Royal commission push after Bondi killings driven by politics, not evidence

The demand for a royal commission into the Bondi killings reflects media and political pressure rather than any clear investigative necessity, writes Dr Evan Jones.

DO WE NEED a royal commission into the Bondi murders? The answer is “No”.

The clamour from the mainstream media has been unrelenting. I don’t look at Murdoch papers to save my mental health. However, Sky News keeps popping up on my screen uninvited — thanks to Microsoft Edge’s penchant for right-wing sites. Sky News, unhinged, has merely added the demand for a royal commission to its non-stop anti-Labor government tirades.

And the Nine media? Equally persistent.

Here are some articles from The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age:

Relentless.

A veritable phalanx of Nine journalists has been assigned to blaming Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and pushing the royal commission bandwagon as an elixir for the tragedy — Brittany Busch, Natassia Chrysanthos, Rob Harris, Chip Le Grand, James Massola, Nick Newling, Paul Sakkal, Amber Schultz. I have emailed several of them directly to express my disdain at their uninformed proselytisation for the cause.

One of them replied (5 January):

A petition backed by prominent Australians and politicians is in the public interest and newsworthy. Our job is to report on current affairs and developments, including public statements by politicians.

You’re welcome to write a letter to the editor if you’d like to further outline your thoughts at… Please remember to be courteous in your communication; there is a hardworking team behind the paper.

Blather. I replied that some of her fellow journalists had abandoned reportage for unlabelled judgement and harassment (not least Le Grand, Harris and Massola). Peculiarly, one article is labelled “Opinion”, whereas the non-stop bumpf is permeated with opinion. Massola (2016), Harris (2018) and Sakkal (2022) have all taken paid junkets to Israel, but it would be easier to number the journalists and politicians who haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid than those who have.

I’ve been writing letters to the SMH regarding Israel for years, with zero success. Here’s my last two – not published:

(15 December 2025)

It’s called blowback.

Israeli forces murder a dozen plus Palestinians daily.

Who in authority cares?

ECAJ has just issued its annual antisemitism report in which Israel is mentioned only once incidentally.

Ditto ‘Special Envoy’ Jillian Segal’s antisemitism report in July 2025.

It appears that all the self-appointed official Australian Jewish organisations support Israel, an apartheid regime, unreservedly.

They make themselves complicit in the ongoing genocide.

They even oppose self-determination for Palestinians clinging on to shreds remaining of historic Palestine.

Anti-Zionist Australian Jews are abused.

The prospect is that the Australian Zionist fraternity will learn nothing from this appalling tragedy.

They will double down on claiming rampant antisemitism while denying the causal elephant in the room which is Israel’s criminality.

(27 December 2025)

Why have a diversionary Royal Commission when the answer is obvious?

Israel was created by terrorism, built on apartheid and ethnic cleansing, now turned to genocide.

This barbaric country claims to speak and act for all Jews.

Australian Jews are Australian.

Yet no representative of any ‘official’ Australian Jewish organisation has spoken out against Israel’s barbarism.

Jewish schools continue to include ‘a love of Israel’ in their ‘Who we are’ statements.

Anti-Zionist Jews and their organisations are vilified.

Now the titular head of this bloodthirsty state has been invited to our country to lecture us on ‘antisemitism’.

Grotesque.

As for the pile-on of groups demanding a royal commission — high farce. And who is rallying the crowds?

The Catholic Church should clean up its own act before it ventures into fields outside its ken.

The business community is not known for its ethical spine — it has none. Happy to cavort at the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce and take junkets to Israel for commercial opportunities.

Our sporting greats! We love them all, but they’re not the sharpest tools in the shed, especially with respect to politics. Who got this lot together?

There’s George Brandis weighing in for a royal commission (5 January). Brandis has always been a hack. Brandis’ hubris has been elevated because of his post-politics sinecures (UK High Commission, now “Professor” at the ANU’s fraudulent National Security College). Beyond Brandis’ charlatanry, why would a Nine editorial give Brandis a regular column in the first place? And before him, there were fellow Liberal Party hacks Amanda Vanstone and Peter Reith (he of the 1998 Patrick Corporation’s waterfront dispute debacle).

Then there are the ex-Labor politicians, calling for a federal authority to ‘examine the “broader ecosystem of terror and hate”’. But hang on. Most of them are self-described members of the Labor Friends of Israel gang and/or the newly minted “Labor Israel Action Committee”. Add the “Australia Israel Labor Dialogue”. Zionists engage in diktats rather than dialogue. Will Israel’s “broader system of terror and hate” be up for examination?

It’s useful to have the pro-Israel apparatchiks listed in one place — all victims of the heady Zionism virus but attempting to spread it to those who remain free of it. Primus inter pares, there’s patriarch Michael Danby, long-time de facto Labor Minister for Israel. There’s the zealous Nova Perris, described appropriately as ‘a long-term supporter of Israel’.

There’s Mary Easson, long-time supporter of Israel (her husband Michael, active pro-Israel defender, is surprisingly not amongst those listed). Easson is part of a pro-Israel faction that has inhibited meaningful resolutions and actions against apartheid Israel from within the Australian Labor Party.

In April 2016, in the SMH itself, we read that Mary Easson was then a lobbyist for the Australian subsidiary of the Israeli armaments company Elbit Systems. Ironically, the author of said article was a member of Sydney University’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPACS). Sydney University has since dismantled CPACS (pressure from the pro-Israel lobby?) In all likelihood, such an article would never see the light of day in the current SMH.

Mike Kelly appeared on the ABC’s 7.30 on Tuesday 6 January. (Kelly also appeared on the ABC’s Radio National, 29 December). Kelly presented soberly but offered nothing of substance as to why a royal commission was necessary. Kelly resurrected the “ecosystem” label, purportedly fostering terrorist acts and hate speech that needs to be uncovered.

Kelly claims that one Royal Commission (Defence and Veteran Suicides) worked well, but wrongly extrapolates as to the utility of the vehicle in general. Host Michael Rowland did not ask Kelly about Israel, neither why Kelly supports the “ecosystem” of this genocidal regime, nor whether Israel’s actions might have something to do with the Bondi murders or “hate speech” labelled as antisemitism.

Kelly was sporting a yellow lapel pin, comparable to that worn by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with reference to the Israeli hostages held captive in Gaza. What’s that about?

The cat is out of the bag regarding whose interests a royal commission is meant to serve. These people are all self-conscious adherents to a state drenched in Palestinians’ blood, yet they have the audacity to claim to speak for the Bondi victims. The media remains oblivious.

Save for cartoonist Cathy Wilcox, with her brilliant cartoon in the SMH and Age, 7 January. The ‘Grass roots’ cartoon has a “groundswell” of disparate groups clamouring for a royal commission, via influencers, marching to Netanyahu’s drumbeat. The cartoon generated a flood of letters, apoplectic, labelling it a quintessential antisemitic trope (SMH, 8 January, 9 January and Age, 8 January, 9 January), albeit with some Wilcox defenders.

Wilcox might have been more fulsome, depicting a symbiotic drumming of Netanyahu and local leading Zionists, with a longer conga line of influencers, but the indelicacy of greater accuracy would have had the clear-sighted Wilcox submerged in torrents of obloquy. SMH (and Age) editorial now finds it desirable to ‘sincerely apologise’ for the distress and pain to those who ‘were deeply hurt and offended by it’. No doubt all those Israeli flags on Bondi Beach would have ameliorated somewhat the distress and pain.

Prominent barrister Robert Richter, with a personal Jewish history of adversity, is adamant that a royal commission is inappropriate.

Claims Richter:

“It was a complete stuff-up by a combination of ASIO, the Federal Police, NSW Police and border control. We don’t need a royal commission for that.”

Richter’s views were sought by royal commission warrior Rob Harris (30 December), yet the tenor of Harris’ presentation is to paint Richter as an eccentric outsider: ‘…one of Australia’s pre-eminent legal minds remains unmoved by the consensus around him’. A manufactured ‘consensus’, that is.

Crispin Hull, the Methuselah of Canberra journalism and drawing on long experience, has proffered a strong thumbs down on a Bondi royal commission. (Bizarrely, he finds no fault with the ridiculous Segal July 2025 antisemitism report.) Even if they produce enlightenment not already known, it is probable that recommendations will not be acted on.

Hull is excoriating, for example, regarding the Robodebt hearings:

“The Robodebt Royal Commission [2022-23] told us little we did not know and, despite blistering evidence and rigorous questioning by the commissioner, no one was finally punished; public administration remains blind to advice from below, and left singed those who tried to expose illegality early.”

Hull is also scathing towards the Hayne Banking Royal Commission (2018-19), an issue close to my own heart. The Banking Royal Commission did lead to the banks (and others like AMP) divesting themselves of their corrupt “wealth management” divisions.

However, the Commission skirted over key issues (entrenched malpractice against small business and farmers, regulatory complicity) and subsequently nothing has changed — the sector acts with near impunity. My critical articles are here: February 2019, June 2019, July 2020, December 2021. The Commission failed because it was evidently structured to achieve nothing of consequence.

A Bondi royal commission direction will depend heavily on the Terms of Reference and on the personnel involved. Albanese seems to have had an early win with the mooted consideration of Virginia Bell as Commissioner, a 12-year veteran of the High Court (as opposed to the mooted James Allsop).

The unflappable foot-in-mouther Josh Frydenberg apparently finds Bell too “left-wing”. In her stellar career, her participation in a 2017 High Court judgment on the right to protest was cited in a NSW Supreme Court decision to allow the Harbour Bridge pro-Palestinian protest to go ahead.

Says Frydenberg:

“It’s unthinkable the Prime Minister would choose a commissioner who did not have the total confidence of the Jewish community.”

Here we have a local “official” Jewish community that not only directly supports apartheid Israel, now genocidal, but which has long actively lobbied (see my ‘Blowback at Bondi’, Counterpunch, 9 January) to prevent Australian governments from taking a principled stand against this foreign power.

So Albanese backflips under pressure and confirms on 8 January that a royal commission will be established. Here is the Letters Patent, 9 January. A disaster. More, we are there informed that “the Australian Government has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism”. A complete sellout to the lobby.

Under the cover of sourcing and stamping out antisemitism, the Zionist lobby sees a commission as a vehicle to stamp out pro-Palestinian protest and de facto legitimise Israel’s ongoing genocide and territorial colonisation of neighbouring countries.

We are going to have to suffer, into the indefinite future, the confected outrage of the Zionist lobby, leveraging this tragedy and their willing vehicles in the mainstream media. Israel will keep on killing and displacing, leading to more acts of resistance or protest that the lobby will label antisemitic and attempt to repress.

A bizarre dimension is that the royal commission is deemed to be a means to forging “social cohesion”. The Zionist lobby as a fifth column for apartheid Israel can only ever function to forge the opposite. Do the proponents of this tripe believe their own preposterous propaganda?

The only grounds for optimism lie in the prospect that royal commission hearings will open a can of worms. And that the principled Virginia Bell will facilitate an open-ended inquiry. Can the lobby keep Israel’s perfidy under wraps?

Is it just possible that commission hearings will expose the influence of the Zionist lobby on Australian Jewish community minds and its unsavoury adverse impact on the media and on the Australian political class’s approach to a country long acting outside international law?