Aussies of a certain vintage will remember this classic ad from the 1980s, my favourite decade.

Yes, following the success of that brilliant campaign, it was inevitable that a new disparaging slang word entered the Aussie vernacular – Clayton’s.

It means a ‘fake’, a ‘phony’, or more specifically, ersatz.

A ‘Clayton’s holiday’ was the holiday was a working holiday. A ‘Clayton’s pay-rise’ was the one that never materialised.

Most recently, this beautiful Aussie adjective has found a new, perfect host: Labor’s Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has accurately been labelled the ‘Clayton’s Royal Commission’.

The royal commission you have when you’re not having a royal commission.

I really didn’t want to say this, but in my opinion the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is worse than a joke, it’s a sham, it’s a fraud perpetrated not only on the Australian Jewish community, but indeed on every law-abiding, tax-paying, peace-loving, freedom-loving Australian.

To be sure, there have been moving and heart-breaking testimonies, but we didn’t need a royal commission to uncover those. The Australian media should have already been doing that if it wasn’t such a useless body riddled with woke progressives, cowards, and antisemites.

But the bottom line, and I said this from the moment the royal commission was announced, is that you cannot have a royal commission into the shooting massacre at Bondi Beach that does not include two very specific words in its title, in its frame of reference, and as its primary focus. Those two words are of course radical and Islam.

Australia has held many, many royal commissions and commissions of inquiry into all sorts of things, including mass fatalities. The formula is fairly well established. A series of deaths happen, the government wants to find out why, so it questions everybody and every institution whose actions might possibly have contributed to those deaths.

For example, 12 children tragically died in Bundaberg in 1928. After a rigorous four months, the commission concluded that the children’s deaths were caused by an immunisation serum against diphtheria that had been contaminated with a certain bacterium, Staphylococcus aureus, identified in pus taken from the surviving children.

But that was only part of the explanation. It turned out that CSL, the manufacturer of the serum, had contributed to the deaths by distributing bottles of serum that did not contain antiseptic.

The Bundaberg Royal Commission established specifically what caused the deaths but also all the processes, failures, and mishaps that led to deaths, right down to the detail that in future all such serum be distributed in glass bottles so any turbidity could be easily spotted and thus deaths prevented.

Will our royal commission into the equally tragic death of 15 Australians, including a ten-year-old girl, last year at Bondi Beach, be able to boast the same success?

By focusing solely on broad and hard-to-define concepts of ‘antisemitism’ and ‘social cohesion’, the royal commission is avoiding the keffiyeh-clad elephant, or should that be even-toed ungulate, in the room. Radical Islam. It was radical Islam that allegedly drove a father and son to terrorise the happy crowds at a peaceful Hanukkah festival. It was radical Islam that allegedly drove them to buy the guns. It was radical Islam that coursed through their veins, allegedly, as they pulled the triggers, time and time again on that horrific day.

Radical Islam must be in the dock.

And antisemitism is at the heart of radical Islam, but it is only one contaminated batch. Antisemitism has been allowed to spread far and wide, infecting the body politic and institutions of mainstream Australian society.

Much like Staphylococcus aureus, antisemitism is a deadly bacterium found in the darkest murkiest recesses of human minds which poisons the souls of those infected. It is highly contagious and will contaminate far and wide if left undetected. Antisemitism requires the antiseptic of daylight – of full, glaring exposure to be destroyed, and of guilt and of individual shame.

Yet not a single person in Belli’s royal commission has had to face their own antisemitism, their own shameful culpability, no matter how profound nor as trivial as that antisemitism may be.

We have heard plenty about the effects of antisemitism. But the poison itself has remained invisible, undetected, festering still in the dark recesses across the Australian landscape.

Why have numerous hate preachers and imams not been grilled about their specific teachings, their stated beliefs, and their instructions to their congregations?

Why has that idiot who was ‘elated’ and overjoyed at the rapes, abductions, and murders of October 7 not been hauled in front of the royal commission and forced to explain, in the full glare of daylight, precisely what was meant and why?

But it’s not just Muslim leaders and activists we haven’t heard from.

Why have none of the vice-chancellors of the universities where this toxin has been allowed to fester been called in to explain what preventative antiseptics they have in place?

Why has Penny Wong not been called in to explain why she refused to go to the kibbutz where the October 7 massacre took place when she visited Israel?

Why has Anthony Albanese, Tony Burke, Bob Carr, or Ed Husic or any of the political figures who have made, wittingly or unwittingly, comments that could be interpreted as antagonistic to Jews or Jewish organisations not been called in?

Why have respected Islamic scholars or experts from either Australia or the Muslim world not been called in to explain what measures should be taken to inoculate devout Australian Muslims from the sections of the Koran and the Hadiths that specifically call for jihad and for the death of Jews and infidels?

Imagine if the Bruce government in 1928 had responded to the Bundaberg fatalities the way the Albanese government has responded to the Bondi deaths. There would have been loads of genuinely moving and upsetting testimonies from grieving parents about the trauma they endured and, well, that’s about it.

Or worse, they would have allowed lawyers for one of the pharmaceutical manufacturers to start quizzing a representative of those parents and survivors.

Pauline Hanson, Angus Taylor, and Matt Canavan, must immediately agree to call a fresh royal commission with an entirely fresh approach the moment they win power.

We need a royal commission into radical Islam, its teachings and its influence within Australian government, institutions, education, and the media. We need to not only identify the effects of the bacterium of antisemitism, we need to expose it for exactly what it is and destroy it.