LATIKA M BOURKE: Anthony Albanese is treating the Bondi terror attack like it’s a political crisis, it’s not

The Prime Minister retreated to process and meaningless politics-speak with his initial wooden response to the Bondi terror attack.

Now he is indulging in stubbornness and obstinacy, as he continues to turn a deaf ear to the pleas of the families of those slain on Bondi Beach who have asked for a royal commission into the murder of their loved ones.

“Announcements made so far by the Federal Government in response to the Bondi massacre are not nearly enough,” 17 families of the victims wrote on Monday.

“Prime Minister, how can you not support a royal commission into the deadliest terrorist attack on Australian soil? Royal Commissions have been established for banks and aged care.

“We have lost parents, spouses, children and grandparents.

“You owe us answers. You owe us accountability. And you owe Australians the truth.”

It is a brave political leader who sets himself up as the Prime Minister to look the victims of Australia’s worst terror attack in the eye and say that their pain, their trauma, their tragedy, does not warrant the nation’s most powerful and thorough style of investigation.

Yet that, inexplicably, is the political calculation Mr Albanese, his advisors and Cabinet have chosen. It is not just a failure of courage and moral clarity; it is also a political dead-end.

Because it means that every single antisemitic attack, like the Christmas morning firebombing of a Rabbi’s car bearing a “Happy Chanukah” sign, will be laid at the Government’s feet, as more evidence of a crisis that continues to pose danger to Jews and the public.

And it will then be up to the Government to defend these incidents, rather than simply refer them all to the Royal Commission already underway.

If the Prime Minister continues with his outright opposition to the nation’s highest form of inquiry, he will enter the new year not as a newly-married, 94-seat-winning, Coalition-destroying Prime Minister on top of his game, but as a weakened figure.

He will remind Labor MPs of the leader he used to be, the one who called and lost the Voice referendum and only just squeaked through his first campaign after a run of unforced errors.

Mr Albanese had appeared to overcome his first-term poor performance with an overhaul of his team and communications style in the lead up to the election campaign.

But the last fortnight has seen a revival of those old traits, the testiness, the inability to generate and deliver a cut-through line that means something.

Those advising him against a royal commission are providing him with poor counsel, as the Prime Minister’s many excuses to defend his decision show.

First up, he complains that a royal commission will take too long. That’s exactly the point; it is meant to be comprehensive. It does not preclude other snap inquiries being carried out at the same time, such as the one the Prime Minister has already commissioned into the intelligence agencies.

The other excuse he gives is that there were no royal commissions after the Port Arthur massacre and the Lindt Siege.

Yet the family of Katrina Dawson, who was killed in the 2014 Lindt Cafe attack, is appalled at Mr Albanese using that tragedy as a reason to avert an inquiry into the carnage on December 14.

Further, they rightly identified the different context in which the Lindt siege occurred, comparing “one devastating incident” to Bondi, which took place after a two-year build-up of antisemitism, which the Prime Minister is accused of not taking seriously enough, then, and now.

This same comparison applies to the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. There were no warnings about Martin Bryant, nor did then prime minister John Howard face accusations that he was risking a dangerous event if he did not crack down on gun control ahead of the attack taking place.

Last week’s Christmas Day arson attack on a Rabbi’s car in Melbourne shows that antisemitism is not going away as an issue, and more critically, as a threat.

It beggars belief that variously, Labor figures including Mr Albanese have campaigned for royal commissions into the former Coalition government’s welfare debt recovery Robodebt scheme, the banks, the Murdoch newspapers, (although this was never Labor policy it was relentlessly pushed by former prime minister Kevin Rudd, who Mr Albanese subsequently appointed Ambassador to the US,) and the AWB scandal but the party does not think a terror attack warrants.

Anthony Albanese would love to be a Labor version of John Howard. But there’s a Coalition prime minister he’s starting to resemble, and it’s a far less flattering comparison — Scott Morrison.

The last prime minister to seriously bungle a national crisis was the Liberal Leader, who was ousted in 2022, partly due to his mishandling of the 2020 bushfires.

Mr Morrison’s perceived abandonment of the country to holiday in Hawaii while bushfires raged at home, and his infamous “I don’t hold a hose, mate,” was an open and shut case of a politically disastrous gaffe.

Mr Albanese’s handling of the Bondi terror attack has been a slow burn in comparison, reflecting his managerial, incremental and cautious style of government that has suited and benefited him – until now.

But two gunmen hunting down Jews to kill them in broad daylight at Bondi Beach is not business as usual, or a domestic electoral issue that can be managed away, or forgotten about over the New Year period and with the passage of time.

Every day he delays and dithers is another day he adds to the pile of political problems mounting at his feet.