There’s much we don’t know, less than 24 hours after the 14 December atrocity at Bondi Beach. But we do know it was the worst terrorist attack ever carried out on Australian soil. It specifically targeted Jewish Australians. It involved at least two people (now understood to be father and son), and they had access to what in Australia would be regarded as high-powered weapons.

The attack, in which the two men shot and killed at least 15 people during a Jewish festival, defiled Bondi Beach, a place sacred in the national imagination. And it came after more than two years of escalating antisemitism and tolerance of associated political violence and disorder in Australia and internationally. A wide-ranging royal commission is needed to examine not just the attack itself but its policy and socio-cultural context.

Australians have been victims of mass casualty terrorist attacks before, the worst at Bali in 2002. There have also been attacks and plots at home, particularly in the ISIS age. Indeed, today is the 11th anniversary of the Lindt Cafe siege. After that outrage, police civilian Curtis Cheng was killed, there was another deadly siege (in suburban Melbourne), the Bourke Street Mall attack, and the murders of an elderly couple, the Antills, in Brisbane five years ago. Each of those events was an act of terrorism.

Yet thanks to effective counter-terrorism investigation and policing (including proactive threat disruption), geography and relative unavailability of firearms and explosives, Australia had been spared the scale of atrocities committed in the same period in Paris, Brussels, Orlando, Nice, Manchester, Christchurch and elsewhere. Until yesterday evening.

We also know this particular moment is no time for recriminations and second-guessing. What must be a priority is tending to the wounded and bereaved and to the nation’s anguish; ensuring no further dangers linked to this vile conspiracy or copycats; and evidence gathering.

That evidence will be important for prosecution and punishment should the second shooter survive. It will also be critical for the national self-reflection to come. Given the atrocity’s scale, that will need to be a royal commission, the highest form of official inquiry in Australia. A coronial or other lesser judicial inquiry would not do. As with the second Hope Royal Commission on intelligence agencies (1983 to 1985), considerations and findings could be sequenced and prioritised to deal first and expeditiously with immediate questions concerning the attack before addressing broader questions.

The royal commission should be empowered to minutely examine what led to the attack, the assailants’ development of intent and acquisition of capabilities, and the knowledge and actions of security agencies and the police before and during the attack. The latter may well feature the grim reality of perpetrators being known to authorities in some way, given the prolific range of possible terrorism cases that must be constantly triaged and prioritised in a security environment rightly characterised by the director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation as ‘flashing red’.

There is already suggestion that one of the Bondi Beach terrorists had a historical association with ISIS sympathisers, although the apparent familial connection suggests that the radicalisation and organisation involved may have had a minimal signature detectable by anyone looking in from the outside. Nonetheless, it will be important to contemplate how systems originally attuned to broader terrorist conspiracies (and more recently to lone actors communicating online) can further evolve to better address such threats.

However, a future royal commission should not be limited to mechanical considerations. It will be imperative to examine the policies and attitudes that brought us to this place. This was not an act of nature—a bushfire, say, or a flood. It was an outcome of policies, attitudes and actions—inadvertent and deliberate—over the past three decades, and especially since October 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza.

That includes well-intentioned but ultimately misguided approaches to immigration and integration that, in risking what Sir Keir Starmer has in his own national context candidly described as ‘an island of strangers’, have corroded national identity and fellow feeling amongst citizens. There has also been an indulgence of antisemitism and an associated, performatively violent politics in our streets. The extraordinary steps that Jewish Australians have had to take individually and collectively to ensure their community’s security for the past two years should have been a klaxon for their fellow countrymen and women.

If you had told Australians in 1995 that a Chanukah celebration by Bondi Beach would be the scene of a terrorist shooting that left at least 15 innocents dead, they would not only have been appalled but baffled. It would be inconceivable. In Australia? And yet here we are. Antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal ^[1] is unerringly correct in this regard: ‘This is not the Australia we know and it cannot be the Australia we accept.’

Australians will be rightly feeling anger along with grief. In this hour we cannot let that anger exacerbate hurt or distract authorities from the work that must be done here and now. But contrary to much well-meant advice, we should not let that anger go. For too long we have allowed tolerance of the intolerable. That has led Australia down a path to the 14 December 2025. A royal commission must be empowered to cut through polite fictions, so not only are we better prepared to prevent and respond to future threats but to ensure the social and cultural conditions in which this twisted evil sprouted are actively undone.