Just twenty five days ago, two gunmen armed with high powered weapons went to Bondou Beach on the first night of Harnaka, and they murdered fifteen innocent people. They wounded dozens more.
Last week, Anthony Alberezi announced a Royal Commission, something he'd spent nearly a month arguing against.
I've taken the time to reflect, to meet with leaders in the Jewish community, and most importantly, I've met with many of the families of victims and survivors of that horrific attack.
Now, former High Court Justice Virginia Bell will lead an inquiry into the Bondai terror attack and the rise of anti Semitism in Australia. It's a major shift the Prime Minister, one that raises questions about how he makes decisions and how he handles pressure. I'm Daniel James and you're listening to seven AM today Press Gallery journalist Karen Middleton on the scope of the Royal Commission, the political fall out of the PMS reversal, and the risk that it all
could lead to deeper division. It's Monday, January twelve. Karen, good to see you again. Let's start with the scope of the Royal Commission. What will it look like and when will it report back?
Well, it's broad, Daniel, it's very broad.
It's going to look at anti Semitism in Australia and it's causes in institutions and society, So broaden that as widely as you like.
This Royal Commission will cover four key areas I set out in the terms of reference that I am releasing today. One tackling anti Semitism by investigating the nature and prevalence of any Semitism, examining its key drivers in Australia, including religious and ideologically motivated extremism and radicalization.
It's going to look into institutions, the government, how much resourcing there's been for agencies, law enforcement and.
Security, including through improvements to guidance and training within law enforcement, border control, immigration and security agencies to respond to any Semitic conduct.
And it's going to see if decisions that were made, see if anything more is needed to prevent these kinds of things happening.
Again, and for make any other recommendations arising out of the inquiry for strengthening social cohesion in Australia and encountering the spread of ideological and religiously motivated extremism in Australia.
What the Prime Minister has done is effectively combined this Federal Royal Commission with the Agency examination that he had already announced, So that was the one that former ASO chief Dennis Richardson was doing. He will now work with the new Commissioner, Virginia Bell on her commission, so he will report his part and they will decide how to give you those responsibilities up by April thirty of this year.
That's considered as an interim report of the Commission, and then she will have to hand down her final report by the fourteenth of December this year, which will be the first anniversary of the Bondi attacks.
And as you said, it'll be run by a former Justice, Virginia Bell. What considerations would the government have made when picking her as Commissioner.
Well, she's done a review for them before.
Remember when they took office and it was discovered that former Prime Minister Scott Morrison had held multiple ministries. Anthony Albanizi, as Prime Minister, appointed Virginia Bell to examine how that all came about, and she handed that report to the government in twenty twenty two.
Virginia Bell is an eminent individual with an extensive and diverse legal career as a community lawyer, a barrister, a law reform commissioner, a Supreme Court as well as Court of Appeal judge before assuming her high office in the High Court of Australia.
So they have selected her despite some criticisms from within sections of the Jewish community, including Josh Bridenberg, the former Treasurer, had suggested that she would not be the best choice.
You would have thought, after two and a half years of this unbelievably bad behavior we've seen in our country towards the Jewish community, that the Prime Minister would have got the support of the Jewish leadership for his choice before putting that name out into the public realm. Unfortunately that didn't happen.
But I think there's now support that the Royal Commission has been called.
Our Royal Commission was not the way Anthony Alberanezi wanted to handle this. In the week after the attack, he announced a more targeted response, as you've referred to an independent review of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. So where does that announcement leave that plan specifically?
Well, that is.
Really What's a bit unclear now that because he's combined these two reviews, the Commissioner and Dennis Richardson will have to work out how the labor is divided up. It's possible they would do something like have Dennis Richardson focus on the operational side of security law enforcement agencies in relations specifically to the Bondi attack, what resources they had, what recommendations they made that were or were not acted upon.
Virginia Bell could do the broader questions of whether the law as it stands has been adequate to prevent anti Semitic attacks or anti Semitism spreading, and this commission can also look at border protection policies, immigration policies, the whole of society. So they do have to divide those responsibilities up and they will need Dennis Richardson's remit to be reasonably focused in order.
For him to get his report in by April.
The Prime Minister has previously argued that a Royal Commission would platform the worst of anti semitism. What is he said now about how he's going to stop that from happening.
Well, he has issued instructions to Virginia Bell to ensure that the Royal Commission does certain things, but also doesn't do certain things. Now it's not allowed to impede the progress of criminal proceedings against the man that has been accused of these murders, bearing in mind that one of the alleged terrorists was killed during the exchange of fire
with police on the fourteenth of December last year. They don't want her to do anything or conduct an inquiry that will impede national security and they don't want it
to impede social cohesion. So making sure that this does not become a platform for further prejudicial comments anti Semitic or otherwise that divides the community rather than bringing it together, because the theme the Prime Minister has really emphasized has been unity, and when he announced his reversal of his decision on a Royal commission, one thing he said was that it had become clear to him in the three and a half weeks since the attacks that saying no
to a Royal commission was not going to achieve unity, and that was a big part of the reason he changed his mind.
The Special Envoy for Randy Semitism, Dellian Siegel's with the Prime Minister as he announced the Royal Commission. She said that he had listened to the Jewish Australians and had made the right call. How significant was that in your view?
I think that was very significant. We'll remember that in the first couple of weeks after the Bondai attacks, the government finally made its formal response to Jillian Siegel's report earlier in the year, and there was criticism of the government for taking too long to do that. Jillian Siegel stood beside the Prime Minister at Parliament House and made that announcement and welcomed the response, although she did emphasize she thought it should have come sooner. She has done
that again with the announcement of the Royal Commission. The Jewish community and the broader Australian community have been calling for a.
Process of this sort of authority.
And it's very important that those calls have been heard. So she is playing a representative role, I guess with the Jewish community in some respects. She was by the Jewish community leadership broadly as the Special Envoy when she was chosen, and so she's really, I think, trying to play a mediating role in that sense, and her standing beside the Prime Ministry was saying, yes, we wanted a royal commission. Yes we had to put hard for it.
It's taken maybe too long. We would have liked it to happen faster and in a different way, but we're glad this decision has been made and we're going to support this process.
So I think it was very important that she.
Was there.
Coming up. Lord Albanese's reversal tells us about his leadership, Karen. This announcement comes after almost a month of pressure from some of the media, from Jewish groups, the opposition, sporting grades and others. I suppose, so is this an admission of failure by the Prime minister.
Well, it's a good question.
The Prime Minister Anthony Albanezi doesn't like to admit failure or apologize or anything like that broadly speaking, and he is certainly not admitting failure. But you have to say that when an attack occurs that kills fifteen people, then there has been a failure of government at every level and agencies to keep people safe, which is the fundamental job of all governments. The question is whether that was
a preventable failure or not. And then there's been the debate about whether there's been a subsequent political failure in the way the Prime Minister has chosen to respond in the.
Three and a half weeks since.
There are certainly some critics in particularly in the opposition, who say it's taken far too long, and Opposition leader Susan Lee is saying that it's a sign of weak leadership. Australias deserve honesty, they deserve answers, they deserve leadership. But he is saying it's a sign that he has listened, that he has acted, and he's in fact now saying that this Royal commission was called in record time if you look at history and how long royal commissions have
taken to be mobilized. So he's trying to suggest that he has been spending this time thinking carefully and drafting these terms of reference and planning.
I mean, the truth is they were saying very strenuously they.
Didn't want to have one and they weren't going to have one right up until just a week or two ago.
So the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Is there a risk that by not holding his original position and being willing to hold his ground, that he's actually going to end up hurting himself politically even more.
Well, I think this whole process has hurt him politically. It's very difficult to try and extricate the politics and the party politics from the substance of the concerns around the attacks at Bondai, because there's been a degree of partisanship in responses to this whole issue going back to certainly to the October seven attacks of twenty twenty three, and so it's all bound up together and I think
it's become very hard to disentangle. But the Prime Minister has been the focus of severe criticism for the way he has responded to this attack.
Certainly the Jewish community were.
Very forceful in their expression of view that the government didn't listen to them when they said they were scared of this kind of thing occurring in the wake of October seven.
To have to think that here in Sydney, Australia, I have to have security full time at my synagogue, My children go to school where they're told not to wear their uniforms outside, and now twelve of our best are gone down. So I mean, there are no words.
So it has certainly left him politically diminished.
If you look back to just May of last year where he had won this incredible victory with his labor colleagues, a huge majority in the House of Representatives, unexpectedly large and was seen as unassailable. I'm not sure that you could reflect on his position as being anywhere near as secure as it was Karen.
Setting aside the politics of how we've ended up here, we now have a Royal Commission. So what will that mean in practical terms? What can the public expect to find out from this process?
Well, that's the big question. The Commission's got to work out the structure. I think there's an expectation of public hearings. I think there would be an outcry if there weren't public hearings, So she has to work out the balance between public hearings and in camera or private hearings. There may be a case for private hearings where security agencies and secret information and operational details are concerned, so we
should expect that there will be some of that. But I think the emphasis in the terms of reference is that this gets underway very quickly and is as.
Expeditious as possible.
So she's got to find a structure that is going to be efficient but also draw as much information out of people as possible and satisfy the public expectation of of public accountability, because I think that was where the government went wrong. There was a sense that it had not properly responded to the demands for public accountability and facts to be laid on the table.
And the personal experience of the Jewish community.
So she's got you know, it's a tough job because part of this is going to be the importance of the process of allowing Jewish Australians to tell their stories and other Australians who may have been subjected to prejudicial treatment in the same context, and also extract information about this particular attack and the circumstances around this attack more broadly that are creating this problem in Australia.
And finally, Karen, I guess the question that a lot of people are really concerned about at the moment is what is the risk that this Royal Commission will actually deepen divisions further.
Well, I think that's always a risk. This issue has a lot of emotion with it.
There are a lot of people in Australia with deep personal ties to both Israel and Gaza and the Palace Inian territories. More broadly, and so this has long been a very difficult issue for a lot of people in Australia. Then we have the October seven, twenty twenty three attacks, which have escalated all of that feeling, and then the
international politics that have gone with that. We see attacks themselves, and then the Israeli response, and we've heard calls from the government to try and separate feelings about the Israeli government in its actions and ordinary Jewish Australians and Palestinian Australians and other Australians of Muslim background to try and
separate all of that. So there is a huge risk that this becomes a full crimp for everybody's prejudices, and so the Royal Commissioner has challenged to try and traverse that in a way that this becomes a positive experience, that people telling their stories enables the rest of the country to understand things from a point of view that perhaps they don't experience in their own life personally.
And we know that's how prejudice works.
It's really often only seen by the person experiencing it. So we want that process, but we don't want it to further entrench the divisions and hatreds and then have the opposite effect of intent.
Karen, thanks so much for speaking with this.
Thanks Daniel.
Also in the news, Victoria Police have confirmed the death of one person as a result of the Longwood bush fire in central Victoria. There are still several bushfires out of control across the state and hundreds of buildings have been destroyed. Authorities say bushfires could burn for weeks and a state of emergency remains in place, and the United States has told American citizens to leave Venezuela amid reports
armed militia are targeting them. The State Department issued a security alert on Saturday that's grubbing reports of armed Progene collectivos setting up roadblocks and searching cars for evidence of links to America. The warning said Americans should remain vigilant and exercise caution while traveling via road, and leave the country as soon as possible. I'm Daniel James. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.