The Government failed at Bondi, now it punishes the people

Australia's leaders micro-managed the internet instead of focusing on real threats

Alleged Bondi killer, Naveed Akram

On December 14, two ISIS-affiliated gunmen massacred 15 unarmed civilians at a Hanukkah festival at Bondi Beach, the icon of Australia’s breezy way of life. Just three police officers guarded the festival. One of the shooters, Naveed Akram, had come to the attention of the Australian security services in 2019, and yet in 2020, his father, an Indian-born non-citizen, was able to legally purchase multiple firearms. Just weeks before their murder spree, the father and son duo spent nearly a month in the Southern Philippines, a hot spot for Islamic terrorism.

Over the past two years, the centre-left Labor government downplayed a wave of never-before-seen antisemitism in the country that included the firebombing of Jewish businesses and a synagogue. Jews, however, sit outside the woke matrix of concern and so were excluded from the usual progressive hyper-policing of every perceived microaggression.

More recently, the government, whose primary role is security, decided its highest priority was micromanaging the Internet browsing habits of everyday people via its teen social media ban. In reality, these efforts amounted to a mass surveillance program that now forces adult users to ID themselves to access a huge swathe of the internet. If only the government had paid the same level of attention to real safety as it did to eSafety it might have stopped kids being shot and killed while playing at the beach.

We saw the depth of the government’s distraction towards micro-management in the Australian Twitter Files, where the “Social Cohesion Division” of the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) tasked itself with policing jokes about the government’s Covid response. The DHA is responsible for national security and oversees Australia’s intelligence agency, ASIO.

Staff at the “Extremism Insights and Communication” program couldn’t even spell, let alone keep their eyes on the ball. Are we surprised DHA’s sloppy work has led us to this tragedy?

Rather than focus on the kind of extremism that can get you shot, the “Social Cohesion Division” felt much of its time would be well-spent reporting jokes, like the one below, to Twitter:

As reported by The Australian, between 2017 and 2022, DHA made “13,636 referrals to digital platforms to review content against their own terms of service.” 9000 were terrorism-related, and 4,213 were listed as “Covid-19 related”. Meaning DHA spent fully one-third of its time monitoring jokes and criticism of the government’s Covid policies (including people who didn’t even live in or have any relationship to Australia), compared to tracking potential and actual terrorists.

I remarked multiple times in interviews, including on Sky News in May of 2023, that DHA’s hyper-monitoring of Covid dissent was off-mission and was in fact putting Australians at risk from real threats.

To cover for their incompetence, the government is now proposing a host of laws to restrict speech, protest, and gun ownership (Australia already has some of the world’s strictest gun laws). While there are some loopholes that I support (such as banning non-citizens owning guns), the vast majority of these proposals are a distraction. The government spoke out of both sides of its mouth on antisemitism and refused to deal with the bad actors because they didn’t want to alienate their voter base. The kumbaya migration and multiculturalism policies of both parties have also proven a failure, and it seems our intelligence services can’t conduct basic police-work.

Woke culture also has much to answer for. Journalist Mark Mordue put it well earlier this week: “We have lost sight of its dangers as aspirations for tolerance become a Trojan horse for parasitic and destructive ideologies. The ostensibly good and ideal is being used to advance the cancerous in our culture.”

The Albanese government is now in a deep crisis. The Prime Minister is reviled by the Jewish community and by increasingly larger sections of the Australian people. He speaks nervously and defensively, and avoids public appearances because of the hostile reaction. The public feeling towards Albanese is the exact opposite of what New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern was able to achieve after the 2019 Christchurch shootings, though that brought with it other problems.

The flailing response is apparently Australia’s “toughest laws on hate speech” that “lower the threshold” and give even more powers to a clearly incompetent government. What could go wrong? “Hatred starts with language” and is the “gateway to violence,” said the Prime Minister yesterday, while also emphasising the problem of “misinformation.” On the cards are banning certain slogans that are far from any direct incitement to violence, anything to distract. Words, not actions, are again the target.

This language policing is a well-worn strategy in the woke playbook. Even if it will now be predominantly directed towards Islamic radicalism, at some point, it will be turned on others. Progressives, too, are calling for action on misinformation to add to the technocratic obsession and distract from the bleeding obvious: the government has let in the wrong people, failed to authoritatively condemn antisemitism, and our migration rate is too high to allow for real integration.

Australia is an increasingly fragmented society where the obsession with diversity has actually led to division. Every day we have less in common with each other, less shared culture and values, and less capacity to self-regulate. As a result, the authoritarian State is called upon to keep the peace. But legislating harmony through force will not solve Australia’s identity crisis.

It must also be said that it is not only the centre-left government that is pushing for stricter speech and protest controls; many on the right are too, as are some sections of the Jewish community (of which I loosely form part). This is understandable, but it undermines the “Australian values” these communities want to protect.

The Christchurch massacre brought together the security state and civil society for the Christchurch Call, a boon for the former, who could now justify their overreach in the friendly language of progressivism, while the latter then failed to hold government overreach to account. We can’t allow this tragedy to be exploited in the same way. There was no free speech failure here - this was a government failure. A silver lining is that the Albanese government has none of the goodwill Arden was able to muster from the crisis that confronted her.

Last week, the Albanese government made a spectacle of itself, claiming how safe it was going to make everything (everywhere, all the time) through the eSafety Commission’s draconian teen social media ban. Australia was seeking to position itself as a global leader, exporting our managerial-safetyist model to the world. In the week that followed, Australians had their bodies shattered, and blood spilled on the sands of Bondi. We don’t need eSafety, we need real safety.

A government that can’t do basic policework is in no position to be setting up a surveillance state, and we should not lose our rights because of their incompetence. Rather than punish the people, the Prime Minister, the Minister for Home Affairs, and the head of ASIO should all resign.