If Albo won't call a royal commission into antisemitism - even after victims' families call for it - his colleagues should replace him with someone who will, writes PVO
There are moments in politics when the choice is obvious. If Anthony Albanese won’t call a Royal Commission into antisemitism, his parliamentary Labor colleagues need to replace him with a Prime Minister who will.
After the Bondi Beach atrocity on December 14 - an antisemitic terrorist attack that killed 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration - grieving families and Jewish community leaders have pleaded for the most serious instrument the Commonwealth has at its investigative disposal: a royal commission into the rapid rise of antisemitism and the failures that allowed it to metastasise into mass murder.
Instead, the PM’s response has been to narrow the lens and lower the volume: a closed door Richardson Review focused on whether agencies such as the AFP and ASIO performed ‘to maximum effectiveness’, with a report due by April.
That is not leadership. It is a lawyerly sidestep dressed up as urgency. A controlled review that isn’t broad enough.
Albanese’s rhetorical shield is insultingly familiar: we need ‘unity and urgency rather than division and delay’.
It sounds noble until it is translated into plain English: don’t ask too many questions, don’t force anything into the open, don’t run a process the government can’t control.
When a Prime Minister reaches for social cohesion as a reason to avoid scrutiny, it’s rarely because cohesion is at risk. It’s because he’s afraid of accountability.
The government’s central argument is that a royal commission would take years and that, in the meantime, Australia needs rapid recommendations to tighten national security settings. Fine.
If Anthony Albanese won’t call a Royal Commission into antisemitism, his parliamentary Labor colleagues need to replace him with a Prime Minister who will, writes Peter van Onselen
Speed matters when there are credible threats and when communities feel hunted in public spaces.
But this isn’t a binary choice. Both a rapid response review and an all encompassing royal commission can happen. Albo is deliberately and deceitfully constructing a false binary choice when there isn’t one. Why?
The only conclusion is that it is to protect himself.
A royal commission’s terms of reference can be narrowed, sequenced, and time-bound. Hearings can be partly closed when genuine security sensitivities require it.
If Albo can summon urgency for a bank, or aged care, then he can summon it when Jews are being targeted for slaughter, a point the families themselves have made, with barely concealed disbelief.
More to the point, the government’s so-called 'fast solution' doesn’t even attempt to answer the question that is tearing at the country.
The Richardson Review is designed to examine what the agencies knew, how they shared information, whether legislative powers were adequate and what could be changed to prevent a repeat.
Those are important issues to be sure. But that is not a national reckoning with antisemitism.
It is not an inquiry into how hatred has been normalised, excused and sometimes opportunistically weaponised in public life since October 7, 2023.
It does not grapple with the cultural permissiveness that allows antisemitic abuse to flourish in universities, workplaces, the arts and online.
It does not put institutions under oath. It does not create consequences which Albo appears so desperate to avoid.
Bondi massacre victim Reuven Morrison with daughter Sheina. She is among the family members who called for an antisemitism royal commission
Listen closely to what the PM and his Home Affairs Minister, Tony Burke, are actually saying. They argue that a royal commission would ‘re-platform’ the ‘worst voices’ and force the country to ‘relive some of the worst examples of antisemitism’ over the past two years. This is the most revealing tell of all.
The government isn’t worried about timeframes. It is worried about testimony, because a royal commission does something that ministerial reviews and independent panels do not. It compels witnesses and evidence to appear before it. It drags evasiveness into the daylight. It forces documents out of hidden drawers. It makes people answer questions they have spent years artfully dodging. It does not permit the gentle language of stakeholder engagement when what is needed is exposure, judgement and reform.
How does Albo reconcile his desperation not to hold a royal commission on antisemitism because it might cause trauma with the fact he previously supported a royal commission into child sexual abuse? It makes no sense at all, is deeply inconsistent and leaves one wondering why he’s suddenly afraid of an inquiry he can’t control.
So yes, the obvious question has to be asked: what has Albanese got to hide?
Is it politically embarrassing and morally repugnant: a mosaic of cowardice, for example? A failure to act early? A reluctance to call out antisemitism when it was bubbling, because doing so risked upsetting internal party constituencies or activist networks?
The community no longer trusts this prime minister, and for good reason. The families of the victims certainly don’t. They want a royal commission yet Albo arrogantly and condescendingly tells them he won’t call one to save them all from further trauma.
The victims' families signed an open letter demanding a Commonwealth royal commission, describing antisemitism as ‘a national crisis that demands a powerful national response’, asking why ‘clear warning signs were ignored’ and how hatred was ‘allowed to dangerously grow unchecked’. Albo responded, not by meeting the gravity of that plea, but by telling the country he has to act ‘in the national interest’, as though the families were lobbying for a vanity project.
There is another uncomfortable possibility here: the PM and his senior ministers fear a royal commission would not only expose extremists, but also expose the mainstream enablers. The activists who dress antisemitism up as anti-Zionism and dare anyone to notice the overlap. Institutional leaders who treat Jewish safety as a complexity to be managed rather than a duty to be enforced. Politicians who have been too cute by half, calibrating their language to avoid offence, and ending up offending decency itself.
Fifteen people were killed in the massacre at Bondi Beach, including a 10-year-old girl
Who might get caught up in that web, I wonder?
A country is not united by suppressing evidence, as Albo is now trying to do. It is united by confronting it, condemning it, and then changing what allowed it to thrive.
Even the list of people pressing for a royal commission, cited back at Albo in his own press conference, should have triggered a moment of humility in our stubborn and arrogant PM. But no, he batted it away, because the ends of avoiding scrutiny are more importantly than the means by which he achieves that goal.
If Labor wants to salvage any credibility on this issue, it has a choice. It can keep circling the wagons around a PM who cannot bring himself to order the one inquiry that matches the national moment, or it can recognise that this is what leadership failure looks like in real time.
If Albo won’t call a royal commission into antisemitism, Labor MPs should replace him with someone who will. Not as a stunt, not as a factional bloodletting. But as a hard, necessary admission that the country needs moral clarity at the top. A Prime Minister who treats the demand for truth as an inconvenience has forfeited the authority to preach unity to those left to bury their dead.
