To attack the pen is to window-dress the failure of the hand that guided it. Doing so obscures the misaligned processes, judgments, and interventions that truly demand scrutiny.
In matters of terrorism and public safety, the law must address intent, conduct, proportionality, and failure of prevention – not mistake the instrument for the author.
If truth is knowledge, then there is no excuse to hold it back.
Crisis, Causation, and the Politics of Reassurance
The Bondi tragedy shocked Australia. It should have. Terrorism is an act of violence and coercion. Its strategic purpose is to provoke fear, fracture social cohesion, and pressure governments into reactive lawmaking that sacrifices restraint for reassurance.
What emerged in the aftermath was not calm analysis of causation, but legislating on the run – lawmaking driven by emotion, optics, and political urgency rather than evidence or constitutional discipline. Firearms were blamed. Protest laws tightened. Police powers expanded. Omnibus legislation rushed forward.
The centrepiece of this response is the Terrorism and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2025 (NSW), a sweeping instrument amending six separate Acts:
Crimes Act 1900 (NSW)
Firearms Act 1996 (NSW)
Firearms Regulation 2017 (NSW)
Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Act 2002 (NSW)
Summary Offences Act 1988 (NSW)
Terrorism (Police Powers) Act 2002 (NSW)
This degree of aggregation is not accidental. It is a political technique. Bundling unrelated regimes together blunts scrutiny, compresses debate, and renders dissent suspect. Parliament becomes a mechanism for reassurance rather than deliberation. That is not how a constitutional democracy should respond to terror.
Antisemitism, Terrorism, and the Danger of Imported Conflict
The rise in antisemitic incidents in Australia is real, serious, and unacceptable. Attacks on Jewish Australians – physical, verbal, symbolic, or ideological – strike at the heart of democratic equality and must be confronted without equivocation. There is no moral ambiguity here. Antisemitic violence and intimidation are criminal acts and must be investigated, prosecuted, and punished accordingly.
Failure to do so is not tolerance; it is abdication.
At the same time, confronting antisemitism does not require – and must not justify – the transformation of Australia into a proxy battleground for overseas conflicts, nor the division of Australian citizens into competing identity camps. Australia is not Israel. It is not Gaza. It is not Ukraine. Our constitutional order, civic culture, and legal traditions are distinct, and they must remain so.
Australia’s success as a pluralist democracy rests on a shared civic foundation: equality before the law, freedom of conscience, and the rejection of collective blame. These principles – shaped by an Anglo-Celtic institutional inheritance and Judeo-Christian ethical traditions – did not exclude minorities. They enabled minorities, including Jewish Australians, to live securely and prosperously under law.
The danger arises when genuine outrage at antisemitism collapses into fear-driven governance. In that environment, political actors are tempted to act symbolically rather than substantively – to ban, restrict, and signal – instead of confronting causation, prevention failures, and institutional responsibility. This is how terrorism succeeds beyond the immediate act: not only by harming victims, but by distorting governance itself.
Terrorism Is About Intent, Not Objects
Australian terrorism law has never defined terrorism by the object used. Section 3 of the Terrorism (Police Powers) Act 2002 (NSW) sets out the objects of the Act, conferring exceptional police powers for the prevention, investigation, and response to terrorist acts defined by intent, ideology, and coercive purpose. Lawful advocacy, protest, dissent, and regulated civilian conduct are expressly excluded.
This distinction matters.
Violence flows from minds and motives, not from lawful instruments. Terrorists select tools opportunistically. Remove one instrument, another appears. To fixate on the object is to treat the symptom while ignoring the disease.
Instrument-focused lawmaking may offer momentary reassurance. It does not offer durable security.
Fear Does Not Suspend the Constitution
Australian constitutional law has long warned against fear-driven governance. Crisis does not displace constitutional principle; it tests it.
In Kruger v Commonwealth (1997) 190 CLR 1, the High Court confirmed that even legislation enacted in pursuit of grave public objectives remains constrained by constitutional structure. Emergency does not dissolve legality, nor does political urgency relieve Parliament of its constitutional discipline.
In Thomas v Mowbray (2007) 233 CLR 307, the Court upheld counter-terrorism control orders only because they were narrowly confined, individualised, evidence-based, and subject to close judicial supervision. The decision does not authorise class-based punishment, collective suspicion, or the imposition of diffuse burdens on lawful populations unconnected to demonstrated risk.
Most importantly, McCloy v New South Wales (2015) 257 CLR 178 established the modern proportionality framework governing laws that burden long-standing freedoms. Such laws must pursue a legitimate objective and be suitable, necessary, and adequate in balance. The High Court was explicit: the importance of an objective does not excuse irrational or excessive means. Indeed, the more serious the objective invoked, the greater the obligation on Parliament to legislate carefully.
That obligation is reinforced by related strands of constitutional authority. In Momcilovic v The Queen (2011) 245 CLR 1, the Court emphasised that clarity, coherence, and predictability are core attributes of the rule of law, particularly in criminal and coercive legislation. In Leeth v Commonwealth (1992) 174 CLR 455, the High Court recognised equality before the law as a foundational assumption of Australia’s constitutional system, cautioning against arbitrary or discriminatory burdens imposed by the state. And in Church of the New Faith v Commissioner of Pay-Roll Tax (Vic) (1983) 154 CLR 120, the Court affirmed the centrality of freedom of conscience and belief, underscoring the principle that government must remain neutral and restrained when regulating matters touching fundamental rights.
Taken together, these authorities form a coherent constitutional warning: fear may explain legislative impulse, but it cannot justify disproportionate, arbitrary, or poorly targeted laws. When Parliament legislates under pressure, constitutional discipline is not optional – it is essential.
Firearms Owners as Political Proxies – Elephant in the Room
It is against this backdrop that lawful firearms owners have been unfairly drawn into the frame.
Licensed firearms owners in Australia are among the most regulated citizens in the country. They are farmers, pest controllers, recreational shooters, collectors, and professionals who undergo rigorous background checks, training, inspections, and ongoing compliance. They are known to the state, regulated by the state, and compliant with the law.
Yet in the aftermath of Bondi, it is this population that has been politically targeted – not because of demonstrated risk, but because they are a convenient proxy. They are visible, regulated, and politically expendable. Penalising them creates the appearance of decisive action while avoiding harder questions about intelligence failures, prevention gaps, and institutional accountability.
This is governance by displacement. The result is not public safety, but the marginalisation of honest citizens.
Impractical Lawmaking and the Erosion of Credibility
Firearms regulation is a technical domain. It requires precision, familiarity with classifications, and an understanding of how firearms are actually owned and regulated. When reforms are proposed without this understanding, they descend into impracticality.
The proposal to ban ‘belt-fed shotguns’ is emblematic. Such firearms do not exist in civilian circulation in Australia. They are not licensed, sold, possessed, or implicated in crime. Legislating against non-existent objects is not precautionary governance; it is symbolic lawmaking.
This pattern repeats across arbitrary caps, blanket prohibitions, and administrative burdens untethered from risk. These measures do not improve safety. They alienate compliant citizens, distort regulatory priorities, and divert resources away from intelligence and prevention where real gains are made.
Collective Punishment and Regulatory Breakdown
Penalising lawful firearms owners for acts they did not commit, could not foresee, and had no capacity to prevent is inconsistent with the rule of law. Australian public law rejects collective punishment. Regulation must be rationally connected to risk, not imposed by association. When compliant citizens are burdened simply because they are easy to regulate, trust erodes and regulatory legitimacy collapses.
Public safety is not enhanced by marginalising those who comply. It is enhanced by targeting those who do not.
Why a Royal Commission Is Essential
This is why calls by former Chief Justice Robert French for a whole-of-Australia Royal Commission are essential. Royal Commissions exist to uncover cause and effect where ordinary political processes are structurally incapable of doing so.
A properly empowered inquiry would examine whether failures arose from intelligence breakdowns, bureaucratic inertia, flawed assumptions, ideological flaws, inter-agency dysfunction, or political risk aversion – and whether lawful citizens were unfairly burdened to mask those failures.
If institutions failed, reform must follow. If policies were symbolic rather than effective, they must be undone. If systems no longer serve their lawful purpose, they must be rebuilt.
That is not radicalism. It is responsible government, a moral imperative.
Conclusion: Truth, Fairness, and National Resolve
Australia stands at a crossroads.
One path leads to fear-driven lawmaking, symbolic bans, and the marginalisation of compliant citizens. The other leads to evidence-based reform, institutional accountability, and durable security grounded in truth rather than comfort.
A Royal Commission is not delay.
It is discipline.
It is how Australia confronts cause and effect honestly – not to scapegoat communities, but to correct institutional deficiencies, bureaucratic mismanagement, and ideological drift. Not to divide the nation, but to unite it under law, evidence, and fairness.
Australia can confront antisemitism without importing foreign conflict into its civic life. It can protect public safety without punishing the innocent. And it can legislate with courage rather than panic.
In doing so, Australia must remain faithful to the civil and human rights that define it: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience, equality before the law, and due process. These rights do not exist merely to protect majorities or recognised groups. The smallest minority in any free society is the individual, and it is the individual whom the law must protect first.
This principle is neither novel nor radical. It lies at the heart of Australia’s Westminster inheritance, shaped by British constitutional traditions of restraint, proportionality, and accountable government. It is reflected in Australia’s international obligations under instruments such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which protects expression, belief, assembly, and due process while permitting only those limitations that are lawful, necessary, and proportionate.
When these freedoms are restricted hastily, under emotional or ideological pressure, the result is not cohesion but quiet corrosion. Discontent takes root when individuals are silenced, marginalised, or punished not for wrongdoing, but for lawful conduct or unpopular association. History shows that societies fracture not when they protect liberty, but when they trade it away in the name of reassurance.
A confident nation does not fear scrutiny, dissent, or difference as we a seeing in Australia. It governs deliberately. It protects minorities without dividing the majority. And it understands that security and liberty are not opposing forces, but mutually reinforcing pillars of a stable and just society.
Attacking the pen is not the answer.
It never was.
