The prime minister has repeatedly refused to concede he made a mistake by not calling a federal royal commission for weeks following the Bondi Beach massacre, as he flagged the high legal stakes of running the highest form of national inquiry alongside an active court case for the first time.
The prime minister on Thursday bowed to weeks of pressure and called a federal inquiry into the circumstances that led to the Bondi attack, in which alleged terrorists targeted a Hanukkah celebration and killed 15 people.
As the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion began on Friday with a meeting of the executive council at the Governor-General’s residence in Sydney, the prime minister appeared on breakfast TV where he refused several times to acknowledge the scale of his backdown after strongly arguing against the inquiry for three weeks.
Asked whether he was sorry that the Jewish community was forced to campaign for the commission while grieving the Bondi tragedy, the prime minister said he had been listening to their concerns.
“I understand, because I’ve listened, that grieving families and others in the Jewish community wanted a broader consideration of the issue of antisemitism,” he told Sunrise.
“I, of course, am sorry for the grief and for what they are going through. My heart breaks for them,” he said.
Albanese argued that the royal commission had been called in “record time”, although Malcolm Turnbull called the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory on July 26, 2016, the day after ABC’s Four Corners aired an investigation into the use of spit hoods and restraints in juvenile detention.
The prime minister did not hold a press conference in Canberra when he visited the National Emergency Management Agency on Friday, as is usual, while Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles failed to explain the change in the government’s thinking in an interview on 2GB, only repeating that the government had been listening.
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley said she wanted to see “ministers be effectively in the dock” during the royal commission, questioned over decisions that the government had made that would have contributed to the circumstances that led to the Bondi killings.
Former Department of Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo said the investigation into antisemitism and social cohesion should be on the public record, but it was likely that for matters of national security, “most of it would have to be held out of the public limelight”.
He said previous royal commissions, such as the Samuels inquiry into the Australian Secret Intelligence Service in 1994, set a precedent for protecting classified activities.
“It just needs to be explained very factually, and the PM should give an assurance for that [part of the inquiry] to put as much out as possible,” he said.
The prime minister, while defending former High Court justice Virginia Bell, AC as his choice to lead the inquiry, said it was crucial that any criminal trial would not be compromised by the royal commission.
Surviving Bondi gunman Naveed Akram has been charged with 59 offences, including 15 murders and committing a terrorist act, which will be prosecuted through the NSW court system while Bell conducts her investigation.
“What you do not want, and I don’t think anyone would want, is for there to be a disruption of that trial,” the prime minister said on Friday, adding that Bell was the best choice of more than a dozen candidates to run the inquiry because of her experience in criminal law and serving more than a decade on the nation’s highest court.
The legal rule of “sub judice” is designed to prevent prejudicial information that could sway the opinions of a jury from being publicised, with those that do so charged with contempt of court.
“This is quite a complex issue,” Albanese said. “There hasn’t been a royal commission before while a legal case was going on. I suspect that might have been one of the reasons why there wasn’t a royal commission into what happened at the Lindt cafe [siege in 2014].”
University of Sydney law professor David Rolph, author of a 2023 book on contempt of court, said the risk to the Akram case was manageable.
“Because the terms of reference for the royal commission are broad, and the commissioner has powers as to what she inquires into at any given point in time, the royal commissioner will be able to minimise or avoid risks of sub judice contempt,” Rolph said.
Akram is expected to front court in April, just as former ASIO boss Dennis Richardson is due to release his report into intelligence failures.
Bell has been given a deadline of December 14, 2026 to return her findings.
Source: stupid_mistake__101
5 Comments
Last I saw albo doesnt work for asio or the cops. Media outrage machine doing what it does best. Help the libs get into power. Such a crock
He didn’t make a mistake, like any critical thinker you update your analysis with more data and evidence.
Except by “data” and “evidence” I mean “lobbyists” “special interest groups” and “bad faith political actors” and by “update your analysis” it’s “kowtowing to the baying hounds”.
I think the mistake was calling it. Because even after it’s been called we’re still getting flooded with tiresome dishonest twatwafflery like this article.
For fuck sake, give it a rest. The country is burning under an extreme heat wave with a number dead already and the media is still harping on on the RC. RC has been called. Move on. The country has more urgent issues to deal with right now.
I think he did make a mistake, not because an RC is necessary but in the sense that this was a political misjudgement – this outcome was predictable and he got himself into an avoidable pickle. I find it puzzling that a PM who is famous for taking the path of least resistance chose this moment to dig his heels in.
But fuck me the media is behaving like a school bully, they pushed until he broke and now they want him to eat dirt. You got what you want, move on.