Albanese’s extraordinary handling of the equally extraordinary aftermath of the Bondi massacre raises questions about the PM’s political judgement. Not for the first time writes Michael Pascoe.
Let’s start with the assumption that Anthony Albanese is not totally disconnected from the informed world, that his reportedly tight inner circle has not insulated him from broader realities.
In which case, he would have known that his November 10 granting of a state funeral for “colourful Sydney political identity” Graham Richardson would attract criticism, would stink in the nostrils of those not indebted to Richo, those who believe such government expense and honour should not be lavished on a tax dodging, criminal consorting, bribe accepting bagman, one comprehensively summarised ($) by the Sydney Morning Herald’s Kate McClymont in the context of her pursuit of crime and corruption figures as “the one that got away”.
But Albo, riding high in the opinion polls thanks to a dysfunctional opposition, politically rich with 94 seats from Labor’s “loveless landslide”, went ahead anyway.
He and his deputy owed Richardson their jobs. Richo was Marles’ mentor, he had become Albanese’s friend. You can almost hear the wheels spinning: “I’m the unchallenged Prime Minister, I have the power, I can do this if I want to and I want to, so damn any ethical nitpickers and let’s have a state funeral.”
Abbott’s dear Sir Prince Philip
In March 2014, six months after his Coalition was elected with 90 seats, two months before his unpopular first budget, Tony Abbott reintroduced knights and dames to the Australian honours system. Abbott was and is a staunch monarchist, he likes imperial honours, maybe fantasised that in time he could become Sir Tony. He was Prime Minister, he had the power, he could do it.
So he did.
The state funeral and the knights and dames both reek of hubris, both raise a middle digit to those who thought the decisions questionable, both dismissive of “the vibe”. Neither was worth the candle.
In January 2015, Abbott went an imperial step further and too far, granting Prince Philip an Australian knighthood. He could. He wanted to. He did. And it was the beginning of his end as Liberal leader the following September, his colleagues having lost confidence in his judgement.
A weak and desperate opposition is hoping Albanese’s Sir Prince Philip moment might be his handling of the Bondi tragedy’s aftermath, specifically his lengthy hold out on not holding a Federal royal commission in the face of an extraordinary corralling of voices calling for one and then holding one anyway.
The campaign by the pro-Israel Jewish lobby, the Murdoch and Nine newspapers had reached a political crescendo not seen in this country since 1975.
Bondi and the Murdoch din
I’ll come back to what Robert Manne in a very fine Substack essay called the “seriously strange” response to the Bondi massacre, but Richo’s state funeral is not the only indication of Albanese’s faltering judgement when he has needed greater leadership qualities and finer political antenna, when he has not been following an unchallenged small-target script,.
Albanese’s biggest failure was his lack of leadership when the Voice referendum was doomed as soon as Dutton made it partisan. Author and former Keating speech writer Don Watson nailed in The Monthly:
“More than likely he reckoned that if the likes of Pat Dodson, Noel Pearson and Marcia Langton and a host of others had given so much of their lives to this cause, he should have the courage to back them in. But what he needed was the courage to say to them – admirable as they are, formidable as they are – as prime minister, as a politician, as someone who is paid to read the political signs, to lead: I can’t go on with this knowing I will be leading you over a cliff. Courage is essential, but defeat in this is unthinkable. We must find another way.”
But he didn’t, setting up a mighty slap in the face of indigenous and broader Australian hopes, setting back reconciliation by decades, filing the beautiful Statement from the Heart in the Too Hard basket, marked “not to be opened in my political lifetime”.
Just as he was delivered the 2022 election by Scott Morrison, the addition of Trump to Dutton gifted Albanese a second term, allowing him to escape any consequences of the Voice disaster. Too bad about the rest of us.
Is that ancient history? Try the way the Prime Minister failed to deal with the Annika Wells travel kerfuffle last month. (Yes, it was just a month ago, erupting on December 3. It’s been a very long month.)
A lack of judgement let it fester instead of quashing it early. Hubris, a weak opposition and maybe laziness left the Prime Minister looking out of it, removed. Richardson’s funeral took place on December 9 with political indulgence dominating the news cycle.
Panic
It took December 14’s massacre of 15 people in and around a Hanukkah celebration to get the rolling noses-in-the-trough stories off the front pages.
And since then the reaction to tragedy has been all over the place, panicked.
The judgement question surfaced earlier though in trying to straddle the barbed wire fence between the pro-Israel lobby and the pro-Palestine protests, never mind the moral issue of where Australia should stand between Netanyahu/Trump on one hand and pretty much the rest of the world on the other.
What to do as the Gaza war turned genocidal, antisemitic incidents spread here and the local Israel lobby attacked any pro-Palestinian statement and individual it could?
Segal – Israel’s The Voice
Oh, let’s appoint a Special Envoy to combat Antisemitism and prominent pro-Israel lobbyist Jillian Segal was there ready to go with the announcement on July 9, 2024. It’s reasonable to wonder whose suggestion it was to appoint such an envoy and, specifically, Jillian Segal.
Appointing a Special Envoy to combat Islamophobia appeared something of an afterthought. It didn’t happen for another three months despite negative attitudes towards Muslims being vastly more common in Australia than towards Jewish people.
As The Jewish Independent reported, the 2024 Scanlon Foundation survey, negative attitudes towards Jewish people had increased but were still low, up from 9% in 2023 to 13% in 2024, about the same percentage as for Hindus and Sikhs.
Negative attitudes towards Christians also increased a little, from 16 to 19%. The main story was that the proportion of Australians with either “somewhat negative” or “very negative” attitudes towards Muslim people jumped from 27% in 2023 to 34%.
And the extent of the political divide is sharply greater when it comes to prejudice. The Scanlon Foundation found 51% of people who describe their political orientation as right-wing had a negative attitude towards Muslims compared with 25% who claim to be left-wing.
Hence the Dutton coalition running hard and fast with unquestioning support of Netanyahu. It served as a dog whistle.
Dutton’s dog whistle – why the grandstanding on antisemitism
Hence the coalition running the Albanese-causes-antisemitism lie; e.g. Michaelia Cash’s pre-election question to Penny Wong:
“Minister, when will you acknowledge that the antisemitism crisis in Australia has been fuelled by the Albanese government’s consistent actions against Israel on the world stage?”
Numbers show the problem
The 2025 Scanlon survey showed a further slight deterioration in attitudes towards Hindus, Jews, Sikhs and Muslims but the net score of positive attitudes minus negative attitudes remains starkly weighted. Christians had a net positive sore of 20, Jews positive 14, Hindus positive score 12, Sikhs positive 9 and Muslims negative 19.
In such a climate, the old political adage of “don’t hold an inquiry unless you know the outcome” might have applied. Instead, Segal delivered a 20-page Antisemitism Plan in July that the government did not know what to do with, was only welcomed by the pro-Israel lobby and widely criticised by others.
As Anthony Klan reported in The Klaxon, nine Australian Jewish groups supported by more than 20 other organisations including Amnesty International and the Human Rights Law Centre, told the government to reject Segal’s plan as it risked undermining Australia’s democratic freedoms, was a threat to human rights and social cohesion and risked “exacerbating instead of combating” antisemitism.
No wonder the government was sitting on it
but on December 18 in its post-Bondi panic, Albanese announced “the Australian Government adopts the Plan to Combat Antisemitism” and would “continue to work through the implementation of the 13 recommendations in consultation with the Jewish Australian community and our Special Envoy”.
That acquiescence did Albanese no favours at Bondi on December 21 when he was booed while NSW Premier Chris Minns was given a standing ovation. Never mind that it was Minns’ government that was responsible for minimal police presence at Bondi and had allowed a neo-Nazi rally outside Parliament House.
(“For the right-wing press, praising Minns has become a means of denigrating Albanese,” observed Nick Bryant in the SMH.)
Herzog brain explosion
Albanese’s judgement took its most spectacular dive though on Christmas Eve when he announced a state visit invitation for Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, a Netanyahu enabler and apologist subject to International Court of Justice criticism for “dehumanising language” that compounded the Gaza crisis.
Herzog had asserted that all Palestinians in Gaza were “unequivocally” responsible for the October 7 Hamas attack.
“The entire [Palestinian] nation out there that is responsible,” said Herzog. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved.”
Herzog, like the hardcore of the local pro-Israel lobby, predictably claims Israel is all tickety-boo, legal, and totally above board.
UN report: Israel practising racial segregation and apartheid
If you wanted to damage social cohesion, if you wanted to ignite protests and encourage chants some in the Australian Jewish community find threatening,
you’d host a Herzog visit.
And then there was the standoff over having a second royal commission.
As Robert Manne wrote, the government’s response to the Bondi massacre and the formation of the anti-Albanese alliance has been both clumsy and rather pathetic, seeking to appease the Bondi alliance with Herzog and adopting Segal’s report yet holding out on the Royal Commission when people saw that as an indication that the government had something to hide.
Royal Commission PR campaign
The RC anti-Albanese campaign has been extraordinary. All those signatures didn’t round themselves up, all those prominent people didn’t rush forward to volunteer their names. As someone posted on X [Editor: that might have been me], next would be a list of café owners calling for a royal commission.
Albanese’s job is politics. It’s poor political judgement to end up cornered, fumbling the early reasoning for not holding a broader inquiry and now potentially looking weak by backing down to grant the thing.
And not just granting it but allowing a glaring omission in what he said were the four key areas for the commission to address:
Investigating the nature and prevalence of antisemitism; making recommendations to assist law enforcement or to control immigration and security agencies to tackle antisemitism; examining the circumstances surrounding the Bondi terrorist attack; and examining ways to strengthen social cohesion and counter the spread of ideological and religiously motivated extremism in Australia.
Christchurch massacre
When the worst hate crime committed by an Australian this century was the massacre of 51 Muslims in Christchurch,
when Islamophobia is vastly more common here than antisemitism,
when Muslims are the target of much of the Coalition/One Nation immigration dog whistling, not mentioning Islamophobia casts doubt on how serious the government is about strengthening “social cohesion” via this commission.
Comes good with Bell
At least Albanese held firm in appointing the distinguished Justice Bell as Royal Commissioner after the Bondi alliance denigrated her as unsuitable, apparently wanting to choose someone they perceived as sympathetic to their political cause.
The door remains open to speculate about the possible reasons for Albanese taking so long to come round, for allowing the issue to fester.
There’s the little matter of sub judice with a man before the courts but it turns out that can be dealt with by simply directing the commissioner not to prejudice any future criminal proceedings. Who knew it could be so easy?
Beyond that, yes, the terms of reference will be a nightmare to draft, still straddling that barbed wire fence. To have credibility the inquiry will need to explore and advise on why one “river to the sea” chant is intolerably offensive while an active “river to the sea” policy is not. Good luck with that.
And then there is a more cynical political possibility.
While all Australians share horror, sorrow and revulsion over Bondi, beyond parts of Melbourne and Sydney east of Glebe, most people do not remain transfixed by that lone wolf evil and witness little if any antisemitism. Maybe there was a political view that there just weren’t many votes in it, until there were.
All up, seriously strange, clumsy and pathetic.
Albo’s search for the middle leaves him exposed on both flanks
Michael Pascoe is an independent journalist and commentator with five decades of experience here and abroad in print, broadcast and online journalism. His book, The Summertime of Our Dreams, is published by Ultimo Press.