In rejecting widespread demands for a royal commission into the surge of antisemitism in Australia – tragically exemplified by the Bondi massacre – Prime Minister Anthony Albanese seems rattled, obstinate, and petulant.

He has to accept that a royal commission is not merely the only viable answer; it is inevitable. The Governor-General holds a pivotal role in this crisis. As Sir Samuel Griffith, the primary author of our Constitution, insisted, the King’s representative is not a rubber stamp. Under the reserve powers, a governor-general can and indeed has the duty to intervene and demand answers from a prime minister.

This very question was put to the Australian people in the 1999 referendum. Nationally, across all states and in 72 per cent of federal electorates, Australians resoundingly said ‘no’ to stripping the Governor-General of the reserve powers.

In my opinion, this explains, then and now, why politicians want a republic.

As Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy (ACM) argued at the time, the proposed model would have created the only republic in the world where it would be easier for a prime minister to sack the president than his cook.

I recall arguing frequently, recorded in The Cane Toad Republic, that this would have allowed a prime minister to dismiss the head of state without grounds, without notice, and without any right of appeal.

On this, Rick Brown devised our most potent rallying cry: ‘Vote no to the politicians’ republic!’

By heeding the ACM’s call, Australians preserved the office of the governor-general to defend the Constitution in times of crisis. That time is now. The Governor-General must demand that the Prime Minister ‘come clean’.

The only way Mr Albanese can retain his commission is by enabling a process that allows the government’s patently unlawful conduct to be examined against the Constitution and the law. Understandably, the Prime Minister fears a royal commission.

It would expose what has been documented in these columns: two decades of antisemitism tolerated by Labor and confirmed by the late Labor eminence, Barry Cohen. Over this period, the Jewish community has scandalously lost the equal protection of the law. Jews have been abandoned by governments to the mercy of increasingly lawless elements. This decay is the result of a two-decade-long cynical understanding between Labor’s leading factions.

On one side is Albanese’s ideological hard left and their fellow travellers in the Greens, who have evolved into Australia’s de facto successor to the communist party,  a global phenomenon and a wildly successful manoeuvre in English-speaking countries where traditional communism struggled electorally. A core dogma of these modern radicals is an irrational hatred of Israel that has morphed into blatant antisemitism directed at all Jews.

On the other Labor side is the NSW Right. Historically led by figures like Paul Keating, they were less concerned with ideology and more with the arithmetic of key Sydney seats with significant numbers of Muslim voters. Their calculation was simple: tolerating antisemitism would help consolidate the Labor vote.

The practical genesis of this alliance was the effort to prevent a Labor minister from deporting extremist cleric Sheikh El-Din Hilaly. Once the hard left and the NSW Right agreed, a reshuffle followed.

Under a new minister, El-Din Hilaly was rewarded with permanent residency, rather than a plane ticket home. The thugs got the message: antisemitism, even violent, was now tolerated. From that moment on, every synagogue or Jewish school, became fair game.

If such government inaction does not breach constitutional, criminal, and civil law, a sinkhole has suddenly opened in the legal system Arthur Phillip established, and the people chose.

Worse still, a high-level investigation would highlight a shameful truth: when Hamas terrorists committed their subhuman atrocities on 7 October 2023, Labor governments allowed celebrations of these crimes to proceed at the Sydney Opera House.

In the years since, governments have allowed what Churchill once called a ‘plague bacillus’, this one of antisemitism, to spread. This state-sanctioned indifference culminated in the massacre at Bondi, where victims were denied proper police protection, unbelievably, even the right to arm paid security guards.

The pressure for a royal commission, preferably a combined federal and state one, must now be bolstered by the Governor-General performing her core duty. She should recall that the people retained her position in 1999 for the very advantage Sir Samuel Griffith recalled long ago in his advice to her predecessor – access to the reserve powers.

It’s her job to insist Albanese explain his failure to uphold the rule of law.

The Richardson Review, while perhaps useful in a narrow technical sense, is no substitute for a royal commission.

Albanese unfairly relies on this becoming a ‘Cæsar judging Cæsar’ exercise, much like the government’s recently announced toothless gas reservation policy – designed to look like action while protecting the status quo.

When the royal commission comes, as it must, we must guard against a ‘fake’ or ‘wet lettuce’ inquiry.

The gold standard remains the 1954 (Petrov) Royal Commission on Espionage. Confronted with lethal Soviet subversion, the government did not hide behind a departmental review.

It appointed three outstanding judges: Justices Owen, Philp, and Ligertwood. A three-member commission prevents the perception of a ‘captain’s pick’.

For an inquiry into the Bondi massacre and its origins, we need a ‘Full Court’ of legal giants – figures of the standing of former High Court judges Michael Kirby AC CMG and Ian Callinan AC KC, alongside a fearless prosecutor like Margaret Cunneen SC.

Callinan’s rigour, Kirby’s commitment to civil liberties, and Cunneen’s experience with violent criminality would provide an unbreakable bench of integrity.

In 1932, Sir Philip Game dismissed Premier Jack Lang because he was wilfully flouting the law. We are approaching a similar threshold. When a government allows a ‘plague’ of hatred to result in the massacre of citizens on Bondi Beach, it has failed its most basic social contract.

The Governor-General is duty-bound to demand a royal commission that meets the Petrov standard – one with the power to subpoena and the independence to expose.

Anything less would be a final betrayal of the victims and a capitulation to the forces that celebrated while the blood of innocents was still warm.