Bondi Royal Commission risks expanding power instead of delivering justice

Marketed as accountability, the Bondi Royal Commission risks entrenching executive power, racialised policing and security theatre instead of justice, writes Aisya A Zaharin.

IN A NOTABLE change of heart, Prime Minister Albanese's Government has reversed its stance, ultimately agreeing to a Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. This shift comes after initially insisting on a review of the nation's law enforcement and intelligence agencies instead.

While the steps have been framed as necessary to maintain public safety, both approaches raise deeper constitutional queries about the limits of executive power, the erosion of accountability and the need to protect Australia’s democratic institutions.

In a settler-colonial state built through dispossession, racial control and imperial violence, formal inquiries rarely trigger the structural transformations as recommended in the past royal commissions. Instead, these commissions often function as “rituals of legitimacy”, absorbing public outrage while simultaneously persevering and expanding the coercive instrument on which the state depends.

At best, it stabilises the political order without altering the material conditions that produce violence in the first place.

To break this cycle, the proposed Commission must ensure its findings are not merely archived but serve as a binding check and balance on executive power.

Executive power and the absence of constitutional safeguards

Australia’s political system is unusually permissive when it comes to executive authority. Unlike most liberal democracies, it has no Federal Bill of Rights or Human Rights Act. Civil liberties are protected indirectly through constitutional structure, common law traditions and political convention.

In theory, this places a heavy responsibility on parliament, the courts and independent oversight bodies to apply checks and balances, preventing the executive branch from overstepping its authority.

In practice, national security has become the domain where those checks collapse, and executive discretion is at its widest and least accountable. Over the past two decades, both major parties have expanded preventative detention powers, lowered thresholds for surveillance and curtailed protest rights, often with bipartisan support.

These laws are justified as exceptional responses to exceptional threats. But their effect has been disproportionately felt by the working class, racialised communities and political dissidents.

This expansion of counterterrorism powers must be understood within the colonial conquest framework; to suppress resistance, regulate racialised labour and to treat populations as threats to be managed rather than citizens to be protected. 

The Bondi response seems to follow this pattern. First comes the securitised response under the disguise of preventative actions: arrest without publicly tested evidence, expanded surveillance and restrictions on protest, while the political narrative emphasises “urgency” over ethical investigation.

This happens despite constitutional orthodoxy that clearly states how necessity does not displace legality. The High Court has consistently held that executive power must remain proportionate, justified and subject to review, particularly where an individual or a group of people’s liberty is at stake.

The danger is not that government is acting to protect public safety, but that such actions are at high risk of occurring with minimal transparency, limited justification and without the institutional safeguards (checks and balances) that are essential to distinguish lawful governance from arbitrary executive decisions.

In this context, the targeting of Muslim and pro-Palestinian communities raises serious equality concerns.

These communities are targeted not due to proven transgressions, but because their resistance within a racialised capitalist-settler framework constitutes an existential challenge to imperial power. Laws that appear neutral on the surface can still operate in a discriminatory manner if applied selectively or informed by racialised assumptions about risk.

The rule of law requires more than formal equality. It demands that power be exercised without bias, that enforcement be evidence-based and that communities are not treated as proxies for geopolitical conflicts beyond their control.

No justice, no peace: Royal commissions and the architecture of settler colonial policing

While royal commissions have served as Australia’s primary tool for examining systemic failure and are justifiable for accountability measures, the real test lies in their execution and the subsequent implementation of their recommendations. 

These precedents reveal a pattern in which royal commissions diagnose harm without dismantling the power structures that produce it.

For example, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody produced 339 recommendations. Yet decades later, the structural drivers of deaths in custody have continued, incarceration has increased, while police powers have expanded and Indigenous communities remain subject to carceral governance. 

Analogously, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse delivered historic truth-telling and exposed profound wrongdoing, but many of its systemic accountability and redress mechanisms remain only partially implemented. 

In the context of Bondi, the risk is especially acute. The emphasis on policing, protest restrictions and racialised surveillance is rationalised as a necessity, risks repeating this cycle.

When royal commission inquiries are narrow in scope, lack enforcement mechanisms, or operate without constitutional commitment, they become exercises in public reassurance rather than the engines of transformative justice.

And without external oversight and proper structural reform, such a process risks legitimising further executive power expansion under the banner of “lessons learned security”.

Imperial alignment, foreign policy and the domestic law

Australia’s domestic security posture cannot be separated from its imperial commitments. The country’s deep intelligence, military and cyber-security ties, particularly with the United States and Israel, have shaped how threats are conceptualised and managed at home (read: AUKUS).

While cooperation itself is not improper, the intricacy of these relationships raises legitimate concerns when domestic policy begins to mirror foreign counterterrorism paradigms.

In the aftermath of Bondi, criticism of Israeli state violence was aggressively reframed by political and media elites as a security risk. Antisemitism (a real and dangerous phenomenon) was cynically instrumentalised to delegitimise dissent and justify expanded surveillance. Jewish fear was instrumentalised not to protect Jewish communities, but to insulate a foreign state from accountability.

These plots collapse anti-imperial critique into extremism, narrow democratic space and align domestic policing with imperial interests abroad. The result is a political environment where opposition to war, occupation, or genocide is treated as suspect while state violence is normalised.

From a constitutional perspective, Australian law does not permit the outsourcing of domestic legal standards to foreign security doctrines. Nor does it allow political speech to be curtailed based on international or foreign alliances.

If counterterrorism policy becomes a vehicle for importing external political priorities into domestic law enforcement, parliamentary sovereignty and democratic accountability are undermined. When this framing dominates, it becomes easier for governments to justify expanded policing and surveillance while avoiding scrutiny of their own failures.

The royal commission's challenge: Understanding constitutional accountability

Australia does not suffer from a lack of inquiries. It suffers from the absence of genuine commitment from our politicians to dismantle and curtail racialised and class power that perpetuates injustice in our country. 

For the Bondi-related Royal Commission to be anything other than performative, it would need to challenge the foundations of the security state, settler colonialism, imperial alignment and capitalist governance that perpetuates the global military industrial complex. This would require an inquiry willing to question not just operational failures, but the legitimacy of the system itself.

That would mean binding enforcement powers, structural limits on policing, democratic oversight of intelligence agencies and material investment in social infrastructure rather than coercion. It would also require centring the voices of those most targeted by securitisation, not as objects of suspicion, but as active participants and stakeholders in public safety.

Such an outcome is unlikely, because it would threaten the interests the state exists to protect.

Ultimately, the findings must carry enforceable consequences. Recommendations without implementation mechanisms serve only symbolic functions and risk entrenching public cynicism and disillusionment.

Equally essential is sustained investment in community-led prevention, not securitisation. Evidence consistently shows that social safety is built through housing stability, mental health services, education and locally embedded community organisations; not through suspicion or collective punishment.

This moment demands intellectual humility from political leaders to reflect basic principles of administrative law, procedural fairness and democratic accountability.

Security cannot substitute for justice

To truly uphold its values of fairness, social cohesion and democratic integrity, law enforcement and protest laws must be rebalanced to protect the fundamental right to peaceful protest. 

Genuine solidarity that respects victims' demands, confronting hate in all its forms without conflating legitimate criticism with bigotry. Antisemitism and Islamophobia both thrive when fear is politically useful, deployed to silence truth and entrench division while enriching the machinery of surveillance and enforcement domestically, as well as internationally (read: imperialism).

The victims of the Bondi attack must be honoured through a response grounded in law, accountability and a commitment to the principles that define a democratic society. Because security without equity and justice is merely an illusion of safety. And a democracy that relies on fear to govern risks degenerating into a fascist regime, sacrificing the very freedoms that are essential to its raison d'être.

Aisya A Zaharin's doctoral research spans multiple disciplines, including political science, history, social justice and Islam.