The Politics of Premature Adjudication: The Bondi Royal Commission

Royal commissions are often held to confirm the obvious and squeak for modest change.  They offer no binding remedies, have no compellable powers against the government of the day, and can, despite claiming to be independent, be susceptible to interest groups.  They are also expensive, laborious, often lengthy and serve as a pacifying agent, absorbing pressure and enabling the governors of the day to delay action.  Scott Prasser, a scholar long versed in the pitfalls of public administration, suggests that such commissions “are most effective when the central problem is a deficit of legitimacy rather than a deficit of information.”

The hankering, bleating insistence on holding a royal commission into the Bondi Beach attack last December, a vicious shooting attack on those celebrating Hanukkah leaving sixteen dead, including one of the shooters, is not free of the usual criticisms.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese initially resisted it, opting for an Independent Review into Australia’s federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, to be led by former domestic intelligence director-general Dennis Richardson.  The review’s primary focus is on the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and Australian Federal Police in terms of performance, appropriate powers, systems, processes and procedures, including information sharing protocols.

Albanese’s resistance to a commonwealth royal commission was also in part because the New South Wales government was already running its own version, one that the Albanese government promised it would support with necessary resources and heft.  But the PM, not exactly burning with conviction, showed that he was for turning.  After much bleating and many open letters by public figures from politics to sports, Albanese announced the creation of Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion to be led by former High Court Justice Virginia Bell.

Even in its infancy, the commission is already facing problems.  Certain public figures in the Australian Jewish community were hoping for a sympathetic, possibly even philosemitic voice to steer it.  The question was not whether the appointee would be sympathetic to the evidence but sympathetic, even partial, regarding the sentiments of an interest group.  In other words, any sense of objective fairness or stern distance from the subject matter would be a secondary consideration.

Showing his specific, parochial understanding of how such a commission would work, NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president David Ossip told The Australian Financial Review that it was “the time to deliver more unity, not less” after “two long years of division in Australia”.  This meant finding a consensus on the choice of royal commissioner, a crude way of saying that the most appropriate person would have to get the seal of approval from members of the Australian Jewish community.  “The royal commission, which will examine what led to the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history and the crisis of antisemitism, must have the confidence of the Jewish community.”

It’s hard not to read more into this, suggesting that Ossip confuses consensus with tinkering, slanting and premature adjudication.  As long as the lobby agrees, then there will be consensus, followed by the appropriate findings.  The president of the Zionist Federation, Jeremy Leibler, is even more direct, bringing a dose of identity politics into play: “Any royal commission must be structured, in terms of reference and the identity of the commissioner, [in such a way that it] has to have the confidence of the community most affected by the attack, which is the Jewish community, as well as the broader community, in order to achieve its purpose.”

Without foundation, the choice of commissioner has come in for some castigation.  Albanese, moaned former Coalition treasurer Josh Frydenberg “has been told directly by leaders of the Jewish community that they have serious concerns” regarding Bell.  “After more than two years of unprecedented hate, harassment and violence directed towards the Jewish community, culminating in Australia’s deadliest terrorist attack at Bondi Beach it is unthinkable the Prime Minister would choose a commissioner that did not have the total confidence of the Jewish community.”  Appoint, appealed Frydenberg, “the right Commissioner whose leadership will provide the answers and solutions our country so urgently needs.”

This begs a troubling question.  What would an appropriate commissioner for Frydenberg be?  One approved by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?  A figure who openly embraced the definition of antisemitism arrived at by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance?  One who had rejected the view, one accepted by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory along with a bevy of civil society and human rights organisations, including the Israeli-based B’Tselem, that Israeli actions in Gaza have been genocidal?

A report by the ABC, attempting to identify those shadowy concerns regarding Bell’s appointment, cite perceptions that “she was associated with the political left.”  They was also a “lack of trust between the community and the Albanese government as a contributing factor in the fear that his eventual royal commissioner pick would not examine elements of the antisemitism issue important to them.”

A bureaucratic, costly bonanza is in the offing.  To Richardson’s review will be added the federal royal commission linking arms, presumably, with the NSW royal commission.  There will be duplication galore.  The premature adjudicators will be hoping for favourable findings to further trim the wilting tree of free speech in Australia while muzzling criticism of Israel’s policies against the Palestinians.

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