As naturally occurs after public violence such as the 14 December Bondi Beach terror attack, we crave clarity. Media outlets search for a single, definitive answer that might impose order on shock and loss. In Australia, that question is usually the same: was the attacker known to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation? This time we’ve seen the scrutiny also go further to retrospective examination of staffing levels and years-old resourcing decisions.

In a liberal democracy, it’s right that institutions entrusted with extraordinary powers should be accountable, particularly when violence erupts in public spaces. But for it to be effective, accountability needs to be informed and not based on a misunderstanding.

Counterterrorism is not just an intelligence problem; it’s a societal one. Prevention depends on political leadership that resists equivocation; media that frames violence with care and context; platforms that enforce standards consistently; and, vitally, communities empowered to intervene early. By the time intelligence agencies are involved, prevention has already narrowed sharply—leaving only disruption as their task.

Asking questions of what was known to whom and when is an understandable impulse—and to some extent necessary and prudent. They offer certainty. In a society saturated with information, urgency and noise, they allow us to move quickly past discomfort and resume the rhythms of daily life. But in exclusively focussing on those questions, we risk diverting attention from the deeper, harder questions that demand time, reflection and collective honesty—especially in this instance.

The more pressing questions are how violent extremism develops in a multicultural democracy such as Australia, and how antisemitism has been allowed to fester in plain sight. These are the questions Australia’s Jewish community deserve answered. But they matter not just to Australia’s Jewish community but to us all, because the answers are what will really prevent future such violence targeting any segment of our society.

Intelligence assessments are not permanent verdicts; they are point-in-time judgements of individuals made with finite information, finite resources and legal thresholds that rightly limit extraordinary powers.

Individuals move in and out of intelligence focus as their circumstances, behaviours and motivations change. An individual who does not meet a terrorism threshold today may do so tomorrow—or never. And the reverse is also possible. Absence of interest in someone at one moment is not necessarily evidence of negligence. It’s the normal operation of a system designed to prioritise the most acute risks.

Expecting intelligence agencies to predict individual acts of violence misunderstands their role. Intelligence manages risk, not inevitability. To demand foreknowledge is to ask intelligence agencies to abandon proportionality and civil rights in favour of pre-crime surveillance, something Australians have never accepted—and shouldn’t.

The focus on whether someone was ‘known’ also narrows our field of vision. It encourages us to see violence as the product of one person’s pathology rather than the outcome of a broader social process.

Violent extremism rarely begins with violence. It more often begins with a deeply personal sense of grievance, mis-identity and moral justification. It grows especially in environments where hateful ideas are normalised, excused or tolerated. It accelerates when individuals come to believe that their anger is shared or validated. This is not necessarily an intelligence or policing problem. Instead, it’s a societal challenge.

Motivations for terrorists evolve. They harden. And they can change rapidly.

Some attackers display no fixed ideological identity until late in the process. Personal crisis, global events or perceived social permission can act as unforeseen triggers, compressing years of grievance into weeks of escalation. Digital platforms further accelerate and inflame this dynamic, collapsing distance and reinforcing prejudice. Lone-actor violence—or violence carried out by a small, closed group, as in this case of a father and son—often appears coherent only in retrospect, once fragmented and concealed behaviours are retrospectively assembled into a narrative of intent.

This means an individual not on the radar months earlier may cross a threshold suddenly—not because intelligence failed to notice something obvious, but because something unknown changed. Media narratives that focus solely on prior awareness flatten this reality. They replace a dynamic process with a retrospective checklist.

There is another risk in this framing. When every act of violence is treated as an intelligence failure, pressure builds for broader surveillance, longer watch lists and lower thresholds for intervention.

That response may feel reassuring in the moment, but it brings a monetary cost. The funds must come from somewhere—usually at the expense of another public service. When public debate treats every act of violence as proof that security agencies simply need more powers or resources, it distorts priorities, weakens public trust, and blurs the line between suspicion and evidence. Over time, this approach risks making intelligence less effective, not more.

Security agencies should be the last line of defence. When they become the only line we talk about, something downstream has already gone wrong. If we want to prevent violence rather than merely assign blame, we need to all ask harder questions about what we’ve tolerated as a society.

We should be examining the environments—online and offline—in which hatred is allowed to take root and spread. We should interrogate the social tolerance that allows antisemitic rhetoric to circulate with limited challenge, and we should ask why Jewish community spaces need to operate behind security gates and why schools require armed guards. We should all be paying attention to the early warning signs that appear in schools, workplaces, communities and digital spaces long before anything reaches a security threshold for ASIO or police.

A pluralistic society should tolerate disagreement, protest and political anger. But it can’t—and shouldn’t—tolerate normalising the dehumanisation of any segment of our society. When those boundaries blur, violence becomes easier to imagine. When silence replaces challenge, some individuals interpret that silence as permission.

Violence is not the beginning of the story. It’s the end of one.

If we want to honour the Bondi victims and heroes alike, and reduce the likelihood of recurrence, we should ask not whether someone was known to ASIO but perhaps how hatred has been allowed to harden into something that made violence seem possible at all. That is a more uncomfortable question precisely because it’s a question we all need to answer.