Prime Minister Anthony Albanese‘s latest trick to try and avoid calling a royal commission into what happened at Bondi is to wrap his calculated, self-interested decision in the lab coat of ‘actual experts’ and hope nobody asks the obvious follow-up: who are they?
When a Prime Minister reaches for that phrase – ‘the actual experts, who are the current experts’ – without naming a single one, it’s not reassurance. It’s evasion. A desperate bid to dismiss the growing list of independent experts calling for a Royal Commission into antisemitism.
Albo wants you to believe that his top advisers are telling him a Royal Commission is a bad idea. What utter rubbish. Security agencies don’t tell governments when to call a Royal Commission. That call is a matter for elected officials, full stop.
Police and intelligence agencies provide threat assessments, operational briefings, capability gaps and legal advice about what they can and can’t do. They don’t get to dictate the accountability mechanism that scrutinises them.
If Albo is implying ASIO and the AFP have advised against a royal commission, he is not only outsourcing a political judgment, he’s outsourcing it to organisations that would sit squarely in the witness box if one were convened. That would be a severe dereliction of his duty as Prime Minister.
And if he’s not implying that, then why hint at it at all? When asked directly whether the heads of the national security and law enforcement agencies advised against a royal commission, Albo didn’t answer. He retreated into the fog of the National Security Committee: ‘we receive advice from all of those bodies’. Thanks for the tip, but that is an obvious truism and completely beside the point.
If Albo’s likely made up ‘actual experts’ are the agencies, the government should say so plainly, and then Australians can judge the credibility and the incentives of who is giving the PM advice not to investigate their shortcomings.
If the ‘actual experts’ are public servants in PM&C or Home Affairs, that’s still not the slam dunk Albo thinks it is. Bureaucrats can advise on process and risk, but they don’t carry democratic accountability for whether sunlight is shone on their patch.
‘When asked directly whether the heads of the national security and law enforcement agencies advised against a royal commission, Albo didn’t answer,’ Peter van Onselen writes
Albo’s latest excuse is pathetic and laughable
And if by ‘actual experts’ the PM means political staffers in his office, well, god help us all. The modern political office is packed with factional lifers and future MP wannabes, many of whom have never run anything more complex than a branch stack.
The tell here is that Albo won’t say who his ‘actual experts’ are, and probably never will. Not one. Not even the category. That’s because the moment he’s specific, the claim becomes testable. Until then, it’s a vibe to suit a purpose. It’s political incense. And to use the vernacular, it’s bulls**t.
The government’s justification for avoiding a Commonwealth royal commission has been dressed up as concern about platforming hateful views and protecting social cohesion, plus the insistence that national security issues don’t belong in that forum. But this is the oldest, laziest argument in the playbook: don’t scrutinise us publicly because the public might hear something ugly?
The entire point of royal commissions is to drag ugly realities into the open: under oath, with coercive powers, and with a public record that can’t be massaged by talking points.
Besides, NSW Premier Chris Minns has committed to holding a state-based royal commission if Albo won’t hold his own one. While this limits the scope of what can get scrutinised (precisely why the PM doesn’t want to hold his own and why he should), won’t it also risk social cohesion and platform extremism, if Albo’s concerns are to be believed? Then why is he supportive of the Minns decision? The arguments the PM is using to avoid transparency and scrutiny are littered with contradictions.
Albo also claims the alternative is urgency: a closed door review with limited terms of reference led by Dennis Richardson, reporting by April, because royal commissions take much longer than that.
Fine. A review into whether agencies had the powers, processes and information sharing needed is worthwhile.
But it is not a substitute for a royal commission into the broader question the country is now grappling with: how antisemitism has been allowed to metastasise into something that culminated in mass murder at a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach.
Daily Mail political editor Peter van Onselen says Albo needs to stop hiding behind unnamed ‘experts’ and hold a royal commission in the Bondi attack (pictured: tributes on the bridge next to the beach where the attack happened)
As mourners continue to leave tributes in Bondi, pressure is building on Albo to agree to a royal commission
Besides, a royal commission can run alongside criminal proceedings and operational work. Governments act and inquire all the time. It’s not a binary choice whereby one response needs to be shelved for the other to go ahead. The nation state can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Yet Tony Burke’s line has been that royal commissions bring delays and distract agencies from keeping people safe. That argument collapses the moment you remember the government has already commissioned an inquiry process, it’s just one with narrower terms, less transparency, and far more control over what sees daylight and when.
If the PM is confident refusing to hold a Commonwealth royal commission is the ‘right direction’ for the country to take, he should stop hiding behind anonymous ‘actual experts’. Name who advised what, in what capacity, and on what basis, or drop the pretence. Because it sounds like utter bullsh**t to me.