The $131 million Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion was promised as a reckoning for the nation, yet this week’s hearings felt more like a masterclass in obfuscation. Australians fought for this inquiry to find out how a terror threat spiraled into the horror of 15 lives lost at a Channukah celebration. This was meant to be the truth finally coming to light, but instead taxpayers were treated to a mere 12 hours of testimony spread across three days. Witnesses like ASIO director-general Mike Burgess and various senior NSW Police officers took the stand, but the most pressing questions were quietly shuffled behind closed doors.
"An unavoidable consequence of taking some evidence in public hearings and later evidence in closed hearings is that the evidence taken publicly will only reveal part of the story."
This caveat, delivered by senior counsel assisting Richard Lancaster SC, serves as the unofficial motto of these proceedings. It’s a convenient way of saying the juicy bits—the ones about intelligence failures and specific security gaps regarding the shooters, Naveed Akram and his father, Sajid Akram—are off-limits to us. Both men had been on the radar of Australian intelligence as far back as 2019 due to links with an Islamic State cell, yet they were cleared and eventually slipped back into the shadows to commit the unthinkable. We don't get to hear how that assessment happened, or why their travel to high-risk zones didn't set off every alarm bell in the country.
While the public sessions were polite and almost clinical, the cracks in the system are glaring. NSW Police admitted that they left security for a 1,000-person gathering at Bondi to a local inspector who only bothered to dispatch four officers. The reason? Internal cohesion was lacking. Operation Shelter, the taskforce specifically set up to protect Jewish sites, was described by Deputy Commissioner Mal Lanyon as existing "in name only" at the time of the event.
It’s the kind of bureaucratic failure that makes you wonder if anyone was actually in charge.
A Pattern of Resource Neglect
The inquiry has also put a spotlight on the controversial budget decisions made by ASIO under Mike Burgess. Despite his insistence that the agency remained well-resourced, data shows he presided over the lowest levels of counterterrorism funding since 9/11. When grilled on why past terror suspects weren't re-examined sooner, he pointed to budget constraints. It’s a baffling admission for a man whose job is to keep the country safe, yet he faced little pushback from the inquiry’s legal team.
Moreover, the NSW Police firearms registry—a system meant to gatekeep who can legally own weapons—had been internally flagged as a security risk long before Sajid Akram obtained his long-arm firearms license. The fact that he could legally arm himself while being known to police is a failure of epic proportions. The federal government is currently fighting to keep Cabinet documents under wraps, further stalling any real transparency on whether ministers actively directed intelligence agencies to scale back their work.
As it stands, we’ve learned more about the failures from investigative journalism than from the official courtroom proceedings. Reports of calls to the National Security Hotline regarding the Akrams in 2007 and 2014, and the failure of the Australian Federal Police to track the pair’s movements in the Philippines and Uzbekistan, have surfaced elsewhere. These are not just administrative hiccups; they are systemic fractures that allowed a known risk to remain unmonitored. Whether Commissioner Virginia Bell eventually uncovers the full truth remains the only real test left for this inquiry.
It's worth noting that the Australian Federal Police's failure to track the Akrams' movements has left many questions unanswered. This lack of transparency not only undermines the trust in the agency but also raises serious concerns about the efficacy of the country's security apparatus.