Bondi Royal Commission risks expanding power instead of delivering justice

Marketed as accountability, the Bondi Royal Commission risks entrenching executive power over justice, racist policing and security theater, writes Aisya Zaharin.

IN A SIGNIFICANT CHANGE, Mr. Prime Minister AlbanianThere is a government of reversed his stance ultimately accepted a royal commission inquiry into antisemitism. This change comes after the beginning insistent instead upon scrutiny of the country’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

While the steps are framed as necessary to protect public safety, both approaches raise deeper constitutional questions about the limits of executive power, the erosion of accountability and the need to protect Australia’s democratic institutions.

In a settler-colonial state built through dispossession, racial control, and imperial violence, official inquiries rarely trigger structural transformations as recommended by past royal commissions. Instead, these commissions often function as “legitimacy rituals”; it absorbs popular anger while at the same time maintaining and expanding the coercive tool on which the state relies. At best, it stabilizes the political order without changing the material conditions that produce the violence in the first place.

To break this cycle, the proposed commission must ensure that its findings are not only archived but also serve as a binding check and balance on executive power.

Executive power and absence of constitutional guarantees

Australia’s political system is unusually tolerant when it comes to executive power. Unlike most liberal democracies, there is no Federal Bill of Rights or Civil Rights Act. Civil liberties are protected indirectly through constitutional structure, common law traditions, and political contract.

In theory, this places a heavy responsibility on Parliament, the courts and independent oversight bodies to impose checks and balances and prevent the executive branch from exceeding its authority.

In practice, national security has become the area where these controls have broken down and where executive discretion is widest and least accountable. Over the past two decades, both major parties have expanded preventive measures. detention powersThresholds lowered for surveillance And restricting protest rightsgenerally with bipartisan support.

These laws are justified as exceptional responses to exceptional threats. But their impact was felt disproportionately by the working class, racist communities and political opponents.

This expansion of counterterrorism forces must be understood within the framework of colonial conquest; suppressing resistance, regulating racialized labor, and treating populations as threats to be managed rather than citizens to be protected.

Bondi’s response also appears to follow this pattern. First, it comes under the guise of securitized response. preventive actions: Detention, expanded surveillance, and restrictions on protests without publicly tested evidence; The political narrative, on the other hand, emphasizes “urgency” rather than ethical investigation.

This happens despite constitutional orthodoxy that clearly states how. Obligation does not replace legality. Supreme Court He has consistently maintained that executive power must remain proportionate, justified and subject to review, especially in cases where the freedom of an individual or group of people is at stake.

The danger is not that the government will act to protect public safety, but that there is a high risk that such actions will occur with minimal transparency, limited justification, and without the institutional safeguards (checks and balances) necessary to separate legal governance from arbitrary executive decisions.

In this context, the targeting of Muslim and pro-Palestinian communities raises serious equality concerns. These communities are targeted not because of proven violations, but because their resistance within the racist capitalist-settler framework poses an existential challenge to imperial power. Laws that appear neutral on the surface can still operate in a discriminatory manner when applied selectively or shaped by racist assumptions about risk.

The rule of law requires more than formal equality. It demands that power be used without prejudice, that its application be evidence-based, and that communities are not seen as agents of geopolitical conflicts beyond their control.

No justice, no peace: Royal commissions and the architecture of settler colonial policing

While royal commissions have served as Australia’s primary means of examining systemic failure and are justified in terms of accountability measures, the real test lies in their implementation and subsequent implementation of their recommendations.

These precedents reveal a pattern in which royal commissions diagnose harm without dismantling the power structures that produce it. For example, Royal Commission Aboriginal Deaths in Custody It generated 339 suggestions. Yet decades laterStructural factors of deaths in custody continuedIncarceration increased as police powers expanded and indigenous communities remained subject to prison rule.

Similarly, Royal Commission into Institutional Responses Child Sexual Abuse delivered telling historical truth and exposed deep wrongs, but many systemic accountability and correction mechanisms remain only partially implemented.

In the Bondi context, the risk is particularly serious. Emphasis on crime, protest restrictions and racialized surveillance is rationalized as a necessity because of the risk of this cycle repeating itself. When royal commission investigations are narrow in scope, lack enforcement mechanisms, or operate without constitutional commitment, they become exercises in public reassurance rather than engines of transformative justice.

Without external oversight and appropriate structural reform, such a process risks legitimizing the further expansion of executive power under the banner of “lessons learned security.”

Imperial harmony, foreign policy and domestic law

Australia’s internal security posture is inseparable from its imperial commitments. The country’s deep intelligence, military and cyber security especially relations with the USA and Israelshaped how threats were conceptualized and managed at home (read: AUKUS). While collaboration itself is not inappropriate, their complexity relationships It raises legitimate concerns when domestic policy begins to reflect foreign counterterrorism paradigms.

After Bondi Criticism of Israel State violence has been aggressively reframed as a security risk by political and media elites. Antisemitism (a real and dangerous phenomenon) sarcastically instrumentalized Legitimizing dissent and legitimizing expanded surveillance. fear of jews It was instrumentalized not to protect Jewish communities but to insulate a foreign state from accountability.

These conspiracies reduce anti-imperialist criticism to extremism, narrow democratic space, and align domestic policing with imperial interests abroad. As a result, a political environment emerges. be against warState violence is normalized, while occupation or genocide is treated as suspect.

From a constitutional perspective, Australian law does not permit the delegation of domestic legal standards to foreign security doctrines. Nor does it allow political discourse to be restricted based on international or foreign alliances.

If counterterrorism policy becomes a tool for translating foreign political priorities into domestic legal practices, parliamentary sovereignty and democratic accountability are weakened. When this framework prevails, it becomes easier for governments to justify expanded policing and surveillance while avoiding scrutiny of their own failures.

The royal commission’s challenge: Understanding constitutional responsibility

Australia does not suffer from a lack of investigation. Our country suffers from the lack of real commitment from our politicians to eliminate and restrict the racist and class power that perpetuates injustice.

for Bondi Royal Commission To be anything other than performative, the security state must challenge the foundations of settler colonialism, imperial alignment, and capitalist rule that sustains the global military industrial complex. This will require an investigation willing to question not only operational failures but also the legitimacy of the system.

This would mean binding enforcement powers, structural limits on policing, democratic control of intelligence agencies, and material investment in social infrastructure rather than coercion. It will also require centering the voices of those most targeted by securitization, not as objects of suspicion but as active participants and stakeholders in public safety.

Such an outcome is unlikely because it would threaten the interests that the state exists to protect.

Ultimately, the findings must carry actionable results. Recommendations without implementation mechanisms serve only symbolic functions and risk reinforcing public skepticism and frustration.

Equally important is sustainable investment in community-led prevention, not securitization. Evidence consistently shows that social security is built through housing stability, mental health services, education, and locally based community organizations; not through suspicion or collective punishment.

This moment demands intellectual humility from political leaders to reflect fundamental principles of administrative law, procedural fairness, and democratic accountability.

Security is no substitute for justice

To truly promote the values of justice, social harmony and democratic integrity, law enforcement and protest laws need to be rebalanced to protect the fundamental right to peaceful protest.

A true solidarity that respects the demands of the victims and opposes all forms of hatred without combining legitimate criticism with bigotry. Antisemitism and Islamophobia is both evolving When fear is politically useful, it is used to silence the truth and entrench division, while enriching the mechanism of surveillance and enforcement both domestically and internationally (read: imperialism).

The victims of the Bondi attack must be honored through a law-based response, accountability and adherence to the principles that define a democratic society. Because without equality and justice, security is just an illusion of security. And a democracy based on fear of governing risks degenerating into a fascist regime, sacrificing the freedoms essential to it. raison d’être.