The appalling massacre of Australian Jews at Bondi Beach on the eve of Hanukkah did not come out of nowhere. It was the violent culmination of a persistent failure to arrest the spread of antisemitism in Australia. It was shocking in its brutality, yet sickeningly predictable. Australia’s official terror alert level had been raised to probable following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza, yet the warnings were met with wilful blindness from the Prime Minister, who failed the test of national leadership at a crucial moment in our history. Even now, he will not acknowledge how antisemitism has been tolerated and normalised within his own party. Or why he left the report of his handpicked special envoy on antisemitism gathering dust as attacks on Jews escalated.

Rather than summon the courage to confront the evil in our midst, the Prime Minister wished it away with moral equivalence, blurring the distinction between the real and active threat of Islamic terrorism and the despicable yet marginal threat of neo-Nazism. Swift action was taken against neo-Nazis, but none against Islamist agitators. He bracketed the deadly, shape-shifting pathology of antisemitism with the contrived prejudice of Islamophobia.

Mr Albanese’s own history on the hard left appears to have rendered him insensible to the antisemitism that has run riot in public broadcasting, academia, and the arts, where it claims respectability by clothing itself in anti-Zionist rhetoric, vilifying the democratic, tolerant, pluralist Jewish state while turning a blind eye to the terrorist atrocities of Hamas and its allies.

The cumulative effect of the demonisation of Israel – combined with the failure of police to enforce the law consistently – was to signal impunity. Islamists read this not as neutrality but as permission, reinforced by hate preachers who continue to be treated as respectable community figures.

Even now, instead of addressing the threat posed by violent jihadists, the Prime Minister hides behind gun control, as if Islamist terrorism were confined to firearms when the Bondi attackers hurled viable bombs that only failed to detonate by chance.

The Prime Minister’s refusal to establish a royal commission into the massacre, and the alarming rise in antisemitism and Islamist extremism in which it occurred, represents more than a failure of policy. To reject the pleas of the Bondi victims’ families, rabbis and leaders of the Jewish community is disgraceful. His invocation of the absence of a royal commission after the Lindt Café siege was repudiated by the families of its victims. There is no meaningful comparison with Port Arthur, widely regarded as the act of a lone madman. The Bondi massacre sits within an ideological, international, and security context that remains unresolved – and likely to recur.

The truth is that the Prime Minister fears a royal commission for the very reason it is needed: because it is independent, empowered to compel evidence under oath, and able to examine the warnings the government received about rising antisemitism, Islamist radicalisation, and hate networks. It can establish what security agencies and ministers did — and failed to do — the implications for immigration policy, social cohesion, public safety, and multiculturalism, which must give way to assimilation. Without full exposure, accountability is impossible, lessons will not be learned, and Australians will remain at risk.

Establishing a royal commission would be an act of statesmanship. It would demonstrate a willingness to examine what went wrong, confront uncomfortable truths, and restore confidence in the nation’s civic foundations. Instead, the obligation has been shirked. By opting for containment over clarity, management over moral courage, the Prime Minister has chosen the politics of evasion. In doing so, he has declined to lead, diminishing the office he holds and failing the victims, their families, the Jewish community, and all Australians.

Mr Albanese justified the Robodebt Royal Commission as necessary to confront a ‘human tragedy’, expose a ‘shameful chapter’, and ensure that ‘nothing remotely similar ever happens again’. By his own logic, the Bondi massacre – vastly deadlier – demands the same forensic reckoning. Anything less is political cowardice and rank hypocrisy.