The Royal Commission stones left unturned

I was nine years old when I first saw a shotgun.

It was December 23, 1982. The Israeli Consulate in Sydney and Hakoah Club in Bondi had been bombed. That evening, walking with my father to synagogue near our Bondi home, I saw a security guard beside a car, its boot open and a shotgun resting inside.

What I eventually understood was that Australian Jews were considered targets, and armed guards outside synagogues had become part of Jewish life in Australia.

Forty-three years later, on December 14, 2025, Jews celebrating Chanukah at Bondi Beach were targeted by Islamic extremists reportedly radicalised in Western Sydney. Fifteen people were murdered.

The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion was established in the aftermath. Its task should be straightforward: determine how Australia reached the point where Australian Jews could be massacred at a public religious celebration by terrorists radicalised here, what failed, and how recurrence can be prevented.

That requires testing causation, institutional responsibility and government failure.

My submission advanced a central proposition: Australia failed to enforce existing laws consistently and effectively. Failures in law enforcement, political leadership and institutional culture allowed antisemitism to become increasingly normalised.

A proper inquiry should ask who decided not to act, why, and whether those decisions were lawful and reasonable.

In Victoria, racial and religious vilification laws had existed for more than two decades. Yet my evidence documented repeated failures to prosecute antisemitic conduct under provisions previously used successfully against religious hatred directed at Muslims.

The Caulfield riots are one example. Approximately 150 congregants were evacuated from Central Synagogue during Sabbath prayers. I provided police with videos, photographs and other evidence. No charges resulted.

This did not occur in an informational vacuum.

On October 12, 2023, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess warned that “words matter” and linked inflamed language with inflamed community tensions. By February 2025, ASIO warned that normalisation of violent protest and intimidating behaviour had lowered the threshold for potentially violent acts. The Commission’s Interim Report records rhetoric expanding from “freeing Palestine” to incitements to “kill the Jews”, and that ASIO briefed state and territory law-

enforcement agencies about the increased threat.

The chronology demands forensic examination.

Warnings escalated. Police were briefed. Antisemitic conduct intensified. Synagogues were firebombed. Jews were assaulted and vilified. Ultimately, Jews were murdered at Bondi.

Yet Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke – two political decision-makers ultimately responsible for the Australian government’s response – have not been called by the Royal Commission to give public evidence.

That omission is difficult to reconcile with an inquiry into government responses and the national security environment preceding Bondi.

During this period, the Albanese government altered the composition and operation of the National Security Committee of Cabinet. Security and intelligence officials ceased being permanent attendees while ministerial participation expanded. Whether those changes affected national security decision-making is precisely what a Royal Commission should test.

The omission is more significant given allegations of antisemitism within the Australian Labor Party and union movement. The Australian reported on August 20 allegations involving ALP and union figures, including false claims that the Bondi massacre was an Israeli “false flag” and mourners were “paid actors”.

Those allegations plainly warrant examination. When a government that initially resisted this Royal Commission confronts allegations of antisemitism within its own political and industrial movement, public confidence demands scrutiny, not insulation.

The Commission’s treatment of protest-related evidence adds to my concern.

I sought limited leave to appear in Hearing Block 7 on protests and policing to address enforcement of existing laws. Commissioner Bell found I had a “direct and substantial interest” in the hearing, yet declined leave.

Contrast that with leave afforded to the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network and Palestine Action Group.

This matters because Vorchheimer v Tayeh [2026] VCAT 134 contained judicial findings directly relevant to the hearing. Vice-President Judge Tran distinguished between the “occasion” for a rally and its broader purpose – including calls for Israel’s destruction – and found an “observable antisemitic and pro-violent presence” at the rally, noting such conduct there and at previous rallies was “open and expected”.

Those were judicial findings after evidence and legal argument, not political assertions.

This is not an attack on Bell or the commission’s integrity. It is about whether its evidentiary record is sufficiently complete for the forensic examination Bondi demands.

Its purpose cannot merely be to catalogue antisemitism and recommend more security funding. It must determine why Australian Jews need armed guards and fortified institutions, and what governments failed to do as that threat escalated.

Forty-three years after I first saw a shotgun outside my synagogue, Australian Jews should not be told the answer is more guards, higher fences and greater security.

The answer must be to determine why those protections became necessary and why, despite repeated warnings, they were not enough to prevent Bondi.

If this Royal Commission does not investigate the failures of government that may have allowed Bondi to become possible, it cannot fulfil that task.

A Royal Commission that claims to leave no stone unturned, whilst choosing which stones not to turn, risks becoming a Clayton’s inquiry – one in name only.

Menachem Vorchheimer is a Melbourne-based Jewish community activist.