Australians limited to keyhole view of Bondi attack scrutiny

Anyone tuning in for a healthy dose of public scrutiny would have been sorely disappointed by this week's royal commission hearings.

Australians fought hard to convince the prime minister to call this $131 million Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion — and this week it entered perhaps its most consequential phase, examining the conduct of intelligence and policing agencies before the Bondi terrorist attack.

The second hearing block is searching for answers about whether ASIO and police dropped the ball on the escalating terrorism threat, surging antisemitism, the gunmen who had slipped off the radar, and security preparations for the Hannukah event where 15 people were shot dead.

But the public has been allowed to see only a sliver of that scrutiny.

From Monday morning to Wednesday lunchtime, we were permitted to observe just over 12 hours of questioning across 10 witnesses.

They included ASIO director-general Mike Burgess, six senior NSW Police officers, an Australian Federal Police (AFP) former counterterrorism chief and two senior officers from the Jewish Community Security Group (CSG).

The commission moved at a fast clip. But even for observers with a keen interest in the minutiae of counterterrorism, intelligence sharing, police planning and firearms licensing, it was a slow two-and-a-half days.

The questioning was gentle.

The longest stint in the witness box lasted just over three hours. The shortest ran for less than half an hour.

Witnesses cross-examined behind closed doors

NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon was notably absent, at least for now. He bears final responsibility for security preparations for the Channukah by the Sea celebration, which the commission has already deemed insufficient, as well as the reduction of police measures to protect Jewish sites and events.

His public defence of those preparations appears to conflict with evidence from his counterterrorism commander that police carried out no risk assessment before the Bondi event.

AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett did not appear at the public hearings either. She led the AFP's counterterrorism command from 2023 and later oversaw the broader national security portfolio, spanning the most critical period under scrutiny.

The public instead heard from Assistant Commissioner Stephen Nutt, who was in charge of counterterrorism at the time of the attack. His evidence lasted 36 minutes and revealed little.

The commission has not revealed whether either police commissioner will appear later.

Most of the evidence in this phase is being heard behind closed doors, with many of this week's witnesses required to return for further cross-examination in secret.

The commission says that is necessary to avoid releasing classified information or prejudicing any future trial of surviving gunman Naveed Akram, who faces charges including terrorism and 15 counts of murder.

The most sensitive questions about intelligence and actions related to Naveed Akram or his father, Sajid — who was shot dead by police — are being asked in private.

Both men had been on the counterterrorism radar since at least 2019, when ASIO investigated them over links to an Islamic State cell and concluded they did not pose a terror threat.

The public did not hear what was done with that information, how later risks were assessed by ASIO and police, how the Akrams were able to legally acquire guns and travel to areas of counterterrorism concern without raising alarm, or why the pair remained beyond active scrutiny as the security environment deteriorated.

Tragically inadequate security preparations

Before cross-examinations began on Monday, senior counsel assisting Richard Lancaster SC issued a caveat.

"An unavoidable consequence of taking some evidence in public hearings and later evidence in closed hearings is that the evidence taken publicly will only reveal part of the story," he said.

It was only a small part of the story, narrowed further by the mildness of his questioning.

Former officials in Australia's policing and security establishments were privately noting from Monday to Wednesday that counsel assisting had their kid gloves on, unlike some of the robust questioning at the Lindt Café siege inquest a decade ago.

Opportunities to go for the jugular were avoided.

The questions were slightly sharper when directed at senior NSW Police involved in preparations for the Channukah by the Sea event.

Regardless, for spectators who didn't drift off, a disturbing picture emerged.

By the time of the Bondi massacre, the warning signs of an antisemitic terror attack were loud and clear — both domestically and internationally — even without specific intelligence of attack planning.

NSW Police and security preparations for the Jewish festival of Hannukah appeared to be tragically inadequate.

NSW Police left preparations for Channukah by the Sea to a local police inspector — who only sent four officers for periodic monitoring — because the gathering of about 1,000 people was deemed a community event.

His commander had an arms-length approach, was confused about planning for past events and had no assistance from Operation Shelter — the NSW Police taskforce devoted to protecting Jews — because, according to Deputy Commissioner David Hudson, it existed "in name only" at that time. That revelation appeared to come as news to the NSW Police Minister on Wednesday.

ASIO's counterterrorism resourcing had also significantly declined, though Burgess insisted it remained sufficient.

His submission revealed the federal government is attempting to block public access to Cabinet documents about whether it directed intelligence agencies to reduce counterterrorism resources — another blow to transparency over the decisions made before the attack. 

Intelligence sharing by Commonwealth agencies was poor, according to NSW Police, who have long had a fractious relationship with partners in the Joint Counter Terrorism Team.

And despite the absence of specific public questions about the Akrams, it emerged that as the terrorist threat escalated in the years before the attack, ASIO had left the father and son off the radar because of a resourcing decision. 

Alarmingly, Sajid Akram obtained a firearms licence through the NSW Police-run firearms registry, allowing him to legally acquire long-arm guns, during a period when a lack of intelligence capability at the registry had been identified internally as a "significant risk" to public safety and police.

Missed opportunities in public hearings

There was little public challenge to the decisions and testimony of Burgess or NSW Police and AFP counter-terrorism chiefs.

Before the hearings began, the ABC revealed Burgess had reduced counterterrorism resourcing to its lowest share since the September 11 attacks before the Bondi massacre. That decision is a key focus of the inquiry.

During his 1 hour and 22 minutes of public questioning on Monday, he defended his decision not to seek extra government funding, saying it would have required ASIO to find savings elsewhere in its budget.

He was not pressed on whether that proposition was accurate.

When he said ASIO was "stretched" but not "leaving serious matters un-investigated", he was not asked how he defined a "serious" matter.

After insisting ASIO had not under-resourced counterterrorism, he gave "resourcing" as the reason the agency only re-examined terror suspects cleared in the past 12 months after raising the national terrorist threat level in 2024.

That meant the Akrams remained off the radar.

The commission let that go through to the keeper in public.

History shows that past terror suspects, who have been cleared by agencies, can go on to carry out attacks years later, as Australia's Counter-Terrorism Plan warns. 

In a written submission, Burgess admitted ASIO and police had been "grappling for several years with how best to manage the residual risk of persons of [counterterrorism] interest who are not under active investigation".

He revealed NSW Police had managed Naveed Akram as a "residual risk", with input from ASIO and other agencies, as recently as 2022 — later than previously disclosed. 

How that process was operating, and whether it was working as intended, went unexplored in public. It will clearly be examined behind closed doors.

Another question also went untouched: what did ASIO mean when, after the Bondi attack, it maintained publicly that counterterrorism was not "deprioritised" and that accounts of a degradation in resourcing were "false"?

There are also crucial questions to be asked of the AFP and NSW Police, including about the recent breakdown of their relationship in the Joint Counter Terrorism Team and whether long-running tensions affected the flow of information before the attack.

The federal government has meanwhile dodged questions about its oversight: whether terrorism received sufficient attention, whether decisions by ministers or Cabinet contributed to the decline in resources, and whether changes and reversals around ministerial responsibility for key national security agencies created confusion or weakened accountability.

So far, Australians have learned more about apparent intelligence gaps from investigative journalism than from the public hearings themselves.

This week, reports included revelations of alleged calls to the National Security Hotline about Sajid Akram in 2007 and 2014, and reported failures by the AFP and Australian Border Force to share information about the Akrams' travel to Uzbekistan and the Philippines.

An eye-watering deadline

The commission still has months of work ahead.

It must hold further hearings, examine more than 12,000 submissions and deliver its findings before the first anniversary of the attack.

Its deadline is eye-watering.

Despite the gentle public questioning, there is no doubt Commissioner Virginia Bell and her team are conducting the inquiry with rigour, in minute detail and with an exhaustive list of matters for examination.

As one seasoned observer put it, counsel assisting may be deploying the old barrister's trick of softening witnesses up before going harder later.

If so, it remains to be seen how much of that harder questioning will happen in public.

There are also good reasons to treat officials who make life-or-death calls with care, respect and humanity.

The brutal personal toll surfaced when the local NSW Police commander responsible for overseeing preparations for the Bondi event became emotional on the stand on Tuesday.

She had admitted taking a hands-off approach and entrusting the job to an inspector who assigned just four officers to patrol the event, despite warnings from the Jewish community of the "heightened risk" of a Hannukah terrorist attack.

She appeared to hold back tears as she insisted an email from that inspector, telling officers there was "no need to stay the entire duration", was "poorly worded".

Counterterrorism and policing carry a horrible reality: not every attack will be prevented, and one day every decision may be scrutinised after lives are lost.

The point of a royal commission is not to humiliate public officials as theatre.

It is to find out whether our costly national security and policing systems, and the governments overseeing them, fell short before people were killed.

A partial public reckoning

The limited public window offered by the commission is still greater than what some other inquiries into terrorist attacks have afforded.

The New Zealand royal commission into the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacre — another attack by an Australian terrorist — was conducted entirely in secret to avoid prejudicing the criminal case.

A public report detailing actions related to the terrorist was only possible because criminal proceedings concluded before the commission handed down its findings.

At the coronial inquest into Sydney's 2014 Lindt Café siege, ASIO was questioned only in closed hearings. Specific findings about the agency remain classified.

The Bondi commission has promised a redacted public report by December, with a fuller version to follow once Naveed Akram's criminal proceedings are over, in addition to a classified report for government.

That may eventually provide the public with some answers, but certainly not all of them.

For now, Australians seeking to understand any intelligence gaps, failures, missed warnings and government failings before the Bondi massacre are being expected to accept a keyhole view.

The hearings have already exposed enough to show there are serious questions to answer.

The harder question is whether the public will be allowed to hear them asked.

Editor's note (30/05/2026): An earlier version of this story incorrectly named Mal Lanyon, instead of David Hudson as the NSW Deputy Commissioner who said Operation Shelter existed "in name only" at that time.