AARON PATRICK: Royal commission asks ASIO chief softball questions over Bondi massacre

The anti-Semitism royal commission was created because Australians wanted to understand how the worst terrorist attack in the nation’s history happened and how to protect Jews from further violence, vilification and hatred.

On Monday, the central figure in a security apparatus that receives $14 billion a year was allowed to avoid any tough questions about what went wrong on December 14 at Bondi Beach.

Over 90 minutes, the director-general of security and head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Mike Burgess, received not one question about what ASIO knew about the two men accused of the attack or what might have been done to prevent it.

It was not as if one of the royal commission’s well-paid barristers, Richard Lancaster SC, did not have any material to work with. On Sunday, News Corp journalist Sharri Markson, who is writing a book about the attack, reported ASIO conducted a “thorough” assessment in 2019 of Naveed Akram, the man charged with 15 counts of murder.

ASIO conducted several interviews with his father Sajid, who died while gunning down Jews and others on that day, according to Markson. Despite being placed on a travel-alert watch list, the pair may have tried unsuccessfully in late 2022 or early 2023 to enter Afghanistan, which is ruled by an implacably anti-Western Islamic theocracy.

The timing is crucial. If it chose to, the royal commission could try to determine if the massacre could have been prevented, or frustrated, by denying Sajid Akram the rifles and shotguns he legally purchased.

A citizen of India, Akram applied for a hunter’s licence in 2020. The paperwork was approved in 2023. Presumably an attempted holiday in Taliban territory might have raised a Parliament House-sized flag at the NSW firearms registry.

Statement of the obvious

Most of the questions to Mr Burgess were about the security bureaucracy and ASIO’s vague warnings before the massacre. Before 2023, ASIO had shifted agents from preventing terrorism to fighting foreign intelligence services, a decision Mr Burgess said was not his but “the system”.

“We are not all seeing and all knowing and we don’t aspire to be,” he said.

At one point, Mr Lancaster had an opportunity any barrister conducting cross-examination might have seized.

Mr Burgess acknowledged that when he raised the national threat of an attack from “possible” to “probable” in August, 2024, he did not warn a rise in anti-Semitism accompanying Israel’s war with Hamas could make Jewish Australians a target.

“You’re correct,” Mr Burgess said. “No, we had not assessed that Jewish Australians were most likely but of course we had picked up on and actually communicated our concerns as to what was happening in anti-Semitism and targeting Israel’s actions and people in Australia.”

Among those communications was a memo after an attack on a Manchester synagogue last October warning of “enduring threats to Jews ... across the globe” and attacks that may “occur without forewarning”.

How are police forces expected to act on what was basically a statement of the obvious?

Avoiding responsibility

Instead of asking if the failure to issue such a warning was a mistake, given state police forces rely on ASIO’s advice when allocating officers to public events and investigations, Mr Lancaster gave Mr Burgess an opportunity to talk up ASIO’s work on Islamic radicalism.

That involved intelligence officers reviewing 12 months of files of ISIS supporters and other extremists who ASIO has previously concluded would not pick up knives or guns or build bombs.

“What was the thinking behind that review going back 12 months rather than a longer period of time?” Mr Lancaster said.

The answer was an example of a bureaucracy’s ability to avoid direct responsibility for its actions and reminding listeners of ASIO’s limited resources, while denying those resources were insufficient, which would embarrass the Albanese government.

“Well, in part, that is a judgment made by our organisation in terms of where we’ve got our resources,” Mr Burgess replied. “What we need to do at that point in time because, of course, we’ve got our immediate caseload that we have under foot that needs to ensure resources are applied.”

A senior Federal Police officer, Stephen Nutt, was in the witness box 37 minutes. Asked if anti-Jewish violence was a “high priority” before the massacre, he said they were a “strategic priority”. The meaning of that phrase remains a mystery because, in the haste to get him off the stand, he was not asked.

Twenty-nine seconds

Last year at the Chanukah by the Sea celebration on Bondi, nobody from the security establishment told the four mostly junior police officers they might be guarding an attractive target for violent forces building up after two years of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish rhetoric.

Within 29 seconds 11 people had been shot, ten fatally. Within five minutes 11 police officers were around the beach, engaged in a gunfight while thousands ran for their lives. Three members of the police force were shot.

Mr Burgess and senior police officers may be asked more pointed questions in the private and classified hearings that are expected to start on Wednesday. If there is to be accountability, it will be behind closed doors.

As if to illustrate his privileged treatment, somehow the ASIO chief entered the inquiry’s offices in central Sydney without being seen by television crews located at the front and rear entrances. The clandestine arrival means he will be spared photographs and video footage of him appearing in the media today.

Assistant commissioners from the NSW and federal police walked in through the front door past camera crews. But they’re law-enforcement officers, not spies, who prefer the shadows.