The NSW Government has spent $94.3m and deployed 250 officers with high-powered rifles in response to one attack. Meanwhile, the Sydney gangland wars continue. Andrew Brown on the double standards.
Last Sunday Chris Minns put soldiers’ rifles on Sydney’s streets. The Armed Response Command cost $94.3 million. It will have 250 police and 28 back-office staff around the clock, patrolling Circular Quay, the beaches and the synagogues. It exists because on 14 December 2025 a father and son murdered 15 people at a Hanukkah gathering at Bondi.
Thirty kilometres west, nobody has spent a cent. Marco Tapia, a university student aged 23, was shot dead by masked men in his family home at Glen Alpine at 3.40 am on 1 September. Thirty-six hours later, Joshua Macdonald, 40, was gunned down outside a house in Merrylands West. Neither had any link to organised crime. The killers got the wrong address.
That is an ordinary Tuesday in Western and South Western Sydney. Contract shootings. Houses firebombed. Stolen cars torched as kill cars. Children hired on encrypted apps to murder strangers.
Taskforce Falcon’s commander, Detective Superintendent Jason Box, counts eight mistaken identity murders since 2021. By mid-September, police had logged seven gangland murders this year and called it
the usual run rate.
For that, Minns has delivered two bills and a press conference. For Bondi, a one-off attack by two men with no network behind them, he has delivered a private army. This is not a policing strategy. It is a hierarchy of fear. Some fear buys rifles. Some fear buys a media release. The Premier has decided which postcodes sit where.
Rifles for the harbour
The ARC was unveiled on 8 October. Officers carry the Australian Combat Assault Rifle and drive purpose-built vehicles. Two weeks after Bondi, Minns assured the public that NSW was not moving toward a militarised police force. Ten months later, he cut the ribbon on one.
Commissioner Mal Lanyon says the ARC will be “anywhere, anytime”. Priority locations: crowded public spaces, sporting matches and places of worship. The unit’s commander, Detective Superintendent Andrew Evans, singled out Circular Quay. Nobody singled out Punchbowl. Anywhere, anytime means the ferry wharves and the football.
The Opera House gets a rifle. Merrylands gets a condolence.
Lanyon also said the ARC would deter those who wish to “incite hatred or cause fear”. That is protest crackdown language, and it arrives after the Supreme Court threw out two of Minns’ anti-protest laws as unconstitutional. Asked for a guarantee it would never face a peaceful rally, Evans refused. Rifles, he said, would be “around the corner”.
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This is the Israelisation of NSW policing. A permanent armed presence, pointed at whoever the state decides threatens social cohesion, and ranked by whose fear the Premier finds useful. The first officers at Bondi carried Glock pistols and were outgunned. That is an argument for what sits in the boot of a patrol car in Bankstown,
not for a standing army on the harbour.
The war that gets a bill
Lanyon admits the vast majority of Western Sydney’s hits are ordered from overseas and carried out by hired kids. Taskforce Falcon made more than 800 organised crime arrests in a year, and the killing continues. That is a unit drowning. The Premier’s answer was a thicker rule book and a promise of resources. Bondi got the resources. Falcon got the promise.
Minns’ response was a bill in May and another in September, with longer sentences for recruiting children and adult penalties for the children recruited. Assistant Commissioner Grant Taylor said gangland murder was “part and parcel” of life in a big city.
Imagine Lanyon telling the Bondi families that terrorism was part and parcel of living near a beach. In Greenacre, it is an official position.
Taylor even said the state was “on track” for its usual eight gangland murders a year. Eight is now a target.
Western Sydney has a murder budget.
The ARC is only the visible layer of what the east receives. Operation Shelter began after Bondi, with static patrols parked outside synagogues and Jewish schools, and now runs more than 4,000 taskings a week.
Armed private guards already stand at those schools and synagogues, and Minns wants them patrolling public events too, over the objection of his own Deputy Commissioner, who warned it would look like favouritism.
When does this end?
When does Punchbowl get a patrol car parked outside its school gate?
The confession
Here is what the Minns government will not say. Its resources follow its politics. The eastern suburbs got $94.3m, 250 officers, 28 civilian staff and a royal commission, for a threat the Australian Federal Police concluded was two men and no network.
Western Sydney got two bills, a drowning taskforce and an assistant commissioner explaining that murder is normal. Police Minister Yasmin Catley says the ARC’s running costs will be absorbed within the existing police budget. That means the commands in Bankstown, Fairfield and Campbelltown are paying for the rifles on the harbour.
Jewish Australians were entitled to protection after Bondi. The point is the speed and the scale, measured against residents of Punchbowl, Greenacre and Condell Park who told the ABC they are frightened to walk to the park with their children. They got Grant Taylor
telling them to get used to it.
Evans told his officers he wants the public to feel reassured when they see an ARC vehicle. Condell Park would love to see one. Reassurance in this state is rationed by postcode. Minns chose the response that photographs well in the seats that matter to him. Western Sydney was never in the frame.
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Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist