“If Albo wants to cut through the nonsense and show leadership he might start with announcing immediately that there will be a royal commission, and that work on its scope and finding a commissioner will continue through the holiday season. It should be up and running by Australia Day,” writes columnist HUGH SELBY.
The calls for a royal commission began soon after the dead and the wounded had been moved off Bondi Beach.
There were, still are, these straightforward questions:
- How could the perpetrators, a father and son, come to believe that it’s acceptable to murder the innocent on a beach on a summer’s evening?
- How could such killers obtain the weapons and ammunition needed for their slaughterous rage?
- How could the combined efforts of our national security, immigration control and policing not thwart these killers during their lengthy preparations before they set out on a Sunday afternoon to wreak carnage?
While there are some who would like the light to shine, there are others, rather more powerful, who want answers that will shift the blame, answers that will muddy the waters, and even some for whom answers may open a path to riches by way of compensation claims. As they say, a loss for one is a gain for another.
Why there must be an independent inquiry
While the victims have been buried or cared for in hospital there will have been round the clock work done by those who failed to prevent the massacre.
What was missed? Why? How? By whom? Was information not logged properly? Was information not followed up? Was information not shared when it should have been?
The reasons to search for causes are, first, to improve standards and skills to prevent a repetition of the disaster. Second, to minimise blame, to shift it elsewhere: not us, them. Third, to justify a request for more resources – staff and funding to increase power and influence.
That work is being done out of the public gaze. The results will be shared with government. What government does with those results will reflect a political assessment of what’s in it for them. We, the gullible public, will be fed bits of carefully curated information, justified as being in our best interest, whatever that means.
We should take it as certain that inquiries done by those with a vested interest, reported to those with vested interests, will not unmask the truth, but will both diffuse blame and shift it.
If we want the cut-short lives of those innocents, taken last week, to have some collective memorable meaning then there must be a public inquiry that cuts through all the bullshit and gets to the best approximation of truth.
What works and doesn’t work
The truth may be so unpalatable politically that government, forced by public pressure to set up an independent inquiry, then works hard to ensure that the extent of the inquiry will be narrow and its outcomes bland.
Practically this means that the first fetter upon a proposed inquiry is its terms of reference. The questions to be asked by the Inquiry can be limited so as to avoid it touching upon matters that may be embarrassing to government, be that politicians or public service mandarins (including senior police).
Should an over-enthusiastic inquiry commissioner or their counsel-assisting be tempted to look outside those terms then that temptation will be rebuffed from the bar table by government-paid lawyers who will eloquently refer to the terms.
Should that eloquence fall upon deaf ears then it’s off to court to get an order restraining the inquiry from going beyond those terms.
The second fetter is the choice of the commissioner or commissioners. The right choice brings outstanding results, such as Trevor Morling’s inquiry that exposed the shortcomings in the investigation into the death of infant Azaria Chamberlain at Uluru (then known as Ayers Rock), Tony Fitzgerald’s inquiry into entrenched police and politician corruption in Queensland, Bernard Teague’s inquiry into the 2009 Victorian Bush Fires (Black Saturday), and James Wood’s inquiry into corruption within the NSW Police.
Each of these commissioners were people of high integrity, outstanding intellect, capable of working well with others, and getting the best out of the people with whom they worked. They produced reports worthy of the time and expense put into them. Their work, and that of their teams, improved our world.
Alas, other entities fall short of those accolades. “Permanent” inquiries, of which the anti-corruption bodies are the best example, have had mixed results. Please make your own assessment of the output from the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) and the ACT’s Integrity Commission.
We will have a good guide to the value of any inquiry when we are told who is to chair it. What we want, what we must demand, is that the commissioner must be known for their even handedness, their work ethic, their breadth of knowledge, their proven capacity to manage investigations, analyses and public hearings, and above all, their independence.
The appointee will not be looking for any preference after the inquiry. They will not have links to politicians, interested public servants or religious bodies with an interest in the outcome. Even a whiff of special favours will doom the process.
An inquiry is only as good as the sum of its parts. The choice of counsel assisting is critical to outcome. That counsel and the commissioner must trust each other and bring complementary skills to the inquiry.
The essential skills are inquisitiveness, team building, tactical planning skills, questioning skills, analysis of information, and persuasive communication both spoken and written.
What we the public see and hear in the public hearings will be the tip of an iceberg. Most of the work of an inquiry is gathering information, analysing it, and only then presenting and testing it in a public hearing.
When counsel assisting questions a witness at a public hearing they should already know both what the witness should answer and what the witness will likely answer. The revelations may be a surprise to us, a career ender for a witness, but to counsel assisting and their team the public hearing is rather like shooting tethered ducks. The squawking does not alter the outcome.
There is, however, another important aspect to some inquiries, one that will be especially important to an inquiry into the Bondi massacre: dealing with grief and trauma.
Bernard Teague’s bushfire inquiry set the standards for compassionate, effective involvement of survivors. Those skills were needed again in the inquiries into institutional child abuse and, more recently, into Defence veterans.
It has long been recognised, though mostly ignored in practice, that inquests into deaths should take place very soon after the death to help survivors come to terms with what has happened.
The survivors of the Bondi victims were thrust into a media and political maelstrom. The razzmatazz continues as politicians past and present seek to make capital from deaths.
If Albo wants to cut through the nonsense and show leadership he might start with announcing immediately that there will be a royal commission, and that work on its scope and finding a commissioner will continue through the holiday season. It should be up and running by Australia Day.
That timetable would allow the newly set up inquiry to gather its staff during February so that survivors are competently interviewed during March. That’s showing actual respect, not feigning it.
A well run public inquiry, with much behind-the-scenes work by counsellors and investigators, can give those survivors some solace, but only if it happens soon.
Dismantling democratic freedoms
The Albo government likes secrecy. It has been doing its best to curtail freedom of information. Its NACC is doing what is wanted: next to nothing. “Nothing to see here in the payout to Ms Higgins” is gobsmacking. Not far behind is the lack of action on Robodebt. A short, dismissive press release doesn’t cut it.
Albo’s team came down hard on whistleblowing. The message is uncompromising. Whistleblowing is bad for your health, whatever the ethical merits. The failure to pardon Witness K for exposing our bad faith in Timor Leste is an example to all.
Anybody thinking of whistleblowing post Bondi should think again. If you have important information keep your mouth shut and your writing fingers still until you can have an unpublicised conversation with a royal commission investigator. If there’s no inquiry then take your information to the grave.
Premier Minns has shown that he is Labor-lite. His moves to curtail protests are the mark of great political insecurity. He has forgotten his party’s history.
Here’s an important message for those who still trust him. Many tributes have been made to the Bondi departed by people who knew nothing of the dead when they were alive. Those tributes are heartfelt. Should they be banned?
Similarly, those who attend rallies to oppose Netanyahu’s genocide, or to oppose “Jew hate”, or to protest against our immigration policies, do so to express themselves with others of like mind in a public space.
Public protest and public tribute are release valves. To turn either off is dangerous to us all.
At a time when there are a few (including, so it seems, foreign actors) seeking to sow division in our community, it is vital that the expression of ideas and beliefs is tolerated, not curtailed.
Minns would do well to endorse a royal commission set up by Albo and then wait to see what that commission finds as to the causes of social unrest.
I doubt that anything will turn up to justify behaving in an anti-democratic manner. Much better for experienced police to sit down with protest organisers and collectively work out a safe approach.
I doubt too that Minns wants to be remembered as the NSW premier that takes up the mantle of Liberal premier Askin, infamous for his remark about anti-Vietnam War protesters: “Ride over the bastards”.
This past week has shown a lamentable lack of political leadership.
In the spirit of good tidings let us hope that some wise men and women are soon seen, heard and heeded.
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