PM Anthony Albanese is no King Canute of Bondi Beach, valiantly holding back the tidal wave of demands for a Commonwealth royal commission. Every day new calls for a royal commission surge past him: from victims’ families, families of the Christchurch mosque massacre victims and survivors, former prime ministers, chief justices, governors-general, army and security chiefs. Just like nature’s tides, twice daily, a fresh wave has swelled only to crash and break on his rock-solid rejection. In resisting each wave, rather than humility, piety and decency, and showing up his courtiers for their sycophantic flattery, Albanese is demonstrating gross arrogance and deceit. An unprecedented cross-section of business, labour, university, political (including from within Labor ranks) and legal luminaries have said antisemitism is a national crisis, an issue that goes beyond politics and concerns the very future of the country. It requires a national response that elevates the national interest above partisan political interests. Only a wide-ranging and duly empowered federal inquiry can hope to uncover the answers to some fundamental questions before we can move forward: the pathways to and sites of antisemitism and radicalisation; the need to confront the liberal assumptions behind multiculturalism that eschews assimilation and integration and demands the host society accommodate to alien languages, customs and mores; the rise in public perceptions of two-tier laws, demonstrations, policing and judiciary; the rise of antisemitism within Labor ranks; the cascading and catastrophic institutional failures.

Albanese gets to choose the commission chair, members, terms of reference and timeline, so why the stubbornness? Because, with special powers to compel witness testimony and evidence, a commission will establish that the government was warned of the likelihood of a terrorist attack on Jews but chose to do nothing. The line from unchecked Jew hatred to Bondi Beach is a straight one. The truth could lead to Albanese’s resignation, the downfall of the Foreign and Home Affairs Ministers and possibly the government. Thus, Albanese puts his own survival ahead of 15 slain Australians. He failed the Jews and is now hiding from his failures, exposed as being out of his depth, out of touch, out of time and out of excuses. People have run out of patience with him.

Albanese’s skills as PM are limited to success in the dark arts of factional and partisan warfare. He has presided over growing sectarian divisions and tensions. Called to action to deal with a national tragedy, he’s been missing in action. Australia had ample warning of the impending tragedy, starting with the vile genocidal chants on the steps of our most iconic site in the immediate aftermath of the 7 October atrocities – before Israel had had time to absorb the shock and hit back hard at the Hamas terrorists – and other chants celebrating the atrocities, followed by an endless cycle of synagogues graffitied, vandalised and set alight, Jewish businesses and students harassed and artists shunned. Tulsi Gabbard, the US Director of National Intelligence, posted on X on 17 December that the Bondi massacre ‘is the direct result of the massive influx of Islamists to Australia’ whose ‘goal is not only the Islamisation of Australia but the entire world’. Albanese refused to take action, still refuses to mention radical Islamist ideology and contrives to hyphenate antisemitism with Islamophobia. This, despite the fact that court cases show over 90 per cent of terrorism-related offences in this century are rooted in Islamist extremism. Everyone but he and his government could sense what was coming. An attack on the Jewish community was not a question of if but when, where and how many killed. Faced with a crisis of the gravest kind, Albanese has shown himself deficient in the most critical attributes of protecting a community at imminent risk of mass casualties, offering solace to a community grievously harmed, comforting a country in shock, and uniting a traumatised nation.

Albanese, Wong and Burke were given ‘multiple briefings’ on the ‘growing and foreseeable threat’ to the Jewish community. Instead of acting with the responsibility that comes with great offices of state, the triumvirate bobbed, ducked and weaved, choosing to ignore the sustained, intensifying pattern of intimidation, harassment, vilification and violence that began immediately after 7 October, spread across states and venues and broadened in scope and targets. Wong has smeared Israel and its government at every opportunity, implied a moral equivalence between the actions of its army fighting urban insurgency and Hamas’s methodical use of human shields and civilian targets, rewarded the perpetrators of 7 October with formal recognition of a non-existent state, and in myriad other ways distanced Australia from the world’s only Jewish state that previously had enjoyed strong bipartisan support. She loves strutting the world stage but has been invisible nationally since the Bondi killings. Questioned on ABC Radio National on 22 December about her failure to visit the site of the 7 October atrocities during her trip to Israel that hurt many in the Jewish community, Wong’s response was a word salad worthy of Kamala Harris: ‘Yeah, look, I regret that, the way in which people have experienced that.’ I simply cannot understand what she meant.

Tony Burke, whose Sydney electorate of Watson includes over 25 per cent Muslims, brought in 3,000 refugees from Gaza (more than France, Britain, Germany and the US combined) and has also quietly repatriated Isis brides. An extra 3,000 immigrants from Gaza is equal to three per cent of the Jewish population of 100,000 (compared to 813,000 Muslims). Given everything we know about the normalisation of antisemitism in the Arab world (see the article by British-Egyptian Khaled Hassan in the UK Telegraph on 31 December), I expect the vast majority of the Gaza arrivals subscribe to mild-to-extreme antisemitism. And we expect our Jewish community to be at ease with this knowledge?

Albanese failed to grasp just how deep-rooted antisemitism has become in Australia as part of the global spread of the world’s most ancient hatred. He refused to confront the crisis with words, condemnation of hate preachers and hateful chants on our streets and university campuses, gestures, reassurance to the many Jewish voices expressing alarm at the numerous public manifestations of rising antisemitism, or deeds, effective action against vandalism and incitements to violence, and implementation of the Jillian Segal recommendations.

Even an article in the New York Times, the bastion of American liberalism, commented that ‘Bondi Beach is what “Globalize the Intifada” looks like’. Nine years ago, Canadian stand-up comedian Norm Macdonald tweeted: ‘What terrifies me is if Isis were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims.’ The reason the joke still resonates today is that Islamophobia has been successfully weaponised to deflect from any criticism of Islamist extremism. Sure enough, a front-page headline in the Sydney Morning Herald on 31 December informed us that, ‘It’s hateful racism: Islamophobia spikes since Bondi attack.’ Albanese fears a royal commission not because it would fail, take too long or re-traumatise the survivors and victims’ families. No, he fears one because it would expose his rat-cunning failures of leadership.