Bondi massacre: Key intelligence and gun-law failings under scrutiny in Prime Minister’s review of attack

A Department of Home Affairs database containing over a million names of people of interest to national security authorities is expected to be a key focus of a sweeping review into the Bondi massacre.

Australia’s national security community is bracing for uncomfortable months ahead as veteran bureaucrat Dennis Richardson identifies possible failings and shortfalls which could have prevented the country’s worst terrorist attack.

So far the Albanese government is resisting growing pressure to call a more wide-ranging and powerful royal commission, arguing that it would delay action and not report for many years.

Instead Mr Richardson, a former defence secretary and spy chief, has this week begun a snap review of the country’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies as ordered by the Prime Minister following the mass shooting that claimed 15 innocent lives.

Announcing the move over the weekend, Anthony Albanese declared “the ISIS-inspired atrocity last Sunday reinforces the rapidly changing security environment in our nation. Our security agencies must be in the best position to respond”.

Mr Richardson will lead a Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet effort to examine whether federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies have “the right powers, structures, processes and sharing arrangements in place to keep Australians safe”.

Three key data points that are likely to be scrutinised are ASIO’s previous interest in Naveed Akram, his father Sajid Akram’s multiple New South Wales gun licences, as well as the pair’s recent travel to the southern Philippines.

Another key focus of the inquiry is expected to be a database known as the Movement Alert List (MAL) which Home Affairs describes as “a key tool we use to apply the legislation governing the entry to and presence in Australia of non-citizens who are of concern for character or other reasons”.

“Details of identities and documents of concern are recorded on MAL as a result of the Department’s liaison with security, law enforcement agencies, other Australian Government departments and immigration officers in Australia and overseas.”

However national security figures say the fact that no alarms were set off by the MAL when the accused Bondi killers flew to and from the Philippines last month is clearly a major concern.

“Given Naveed Akram was known to authorities since 2019, and his father Sajid was the registered owner of six firearms, it really is concerning that no alarms went off when the two of them flew to the Philippines last month,” one former top official says.

“This failure to connect the dots is an obvious failure for agencies — particularly in an era of big data and Large Language Model artificial intelligence, these things really should be getting picked up.”

The same veteran law enforcement figure believes recent funding levels of the Joint Counter Terrorism Teams across Australia will be carefully studied, as well as rapid response counterterrorism teams that have operated in larger capital cities since the ISIS threat emerged a decade ago.

On Sunday shortly after the Prime Minister announced the Richardson review, ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess welcomed the move and vowed if his organisation was found to have made mistakes “we will own them and we will learn from them”.

“I welcome scrutiny and embrace accountability, but some of the recent criticisms of ASIO have been unfounded,” Mr Burgess said in a statement hitting back at recent stinging criticism of the intelligence agency.

“Tragically, in this case we did not know about the attack before it happened. That is a matter of grave regret for me and my officers. It weighs on us heavily. But that does not necessarily mean there was an intelligence failure or that my officers made mistakes.”

“The review provides an opportunity for us to refute claims such as we failed to pass on relevant intelligence, defunded and deprioritised counterterrorism, and ‘purged’ our experienced counterterrorism officers. None of these claims are true.”

Former Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo has argued that only a royal commission could effectively probe the anti-Semitic attack at Bondi, and the actions of the government including its now reversed decision to dismantle the department he once ran.