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Chapter 1: What are the implications of the Bondi terror attack on Australia's Jewish community?
Five months on from the attack, Australia's Jewish community is still grieving, still hurting, still craving answers. And that's why my government set up the Royal Commission on Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion.
led by the Honor- The first report into the Royal Commission into anti-Semitism has landed at a volatile moment. Australia's terrorism level is already listed as probable, and the war in Iran is adding new pressure to an already fragile security environment that risks fueling grievances, flaming extremism, and increasing the risk facing Jewish communities in the wake of the Bondi terror attack.
Today the government is pleased to receive Commissioner Bell's interim report. And I thank the Commissioner for the extraordinary work that she and her team have done.
But the interim report leaves some of the hardest questions for later, including whether warnings before the attack were properly acted on and whether security agencies were on the same page when it came to identifying the threat. I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to 7am.
Chapter 2: How does the Royal Commission into Antisemitism address current security threats?
Today, counter-terrorism expert Greg Barton on what the report reveals and why the threat facing Australia may be growing faster than the systems built to stop it. It's Friday, May 1. Greg, thanks for joining us again. The interim report recognises that our counter-terrorism capability needs bolstering, making 14 recommendations about how that should be done.
Chapter 3: What recommendations does the interim report make for counter-terrorism efforts?
I can confirm that the National Security Committee has met this morning and we have adopted and will implement all the recommendations of the interim report that are relevant to the Commonwealth.
Not all the recommendations in the report have been made public at this stage. Out of the ones that we do know about, which ones resonate with you most at this point?
I think making the counterterrorism coordinator full time and sort of linking that back in with crisis management, so sort of upping the priority for counterterrorism. I think this is a Royal Commission interim findings into a particular incident, but it also sits in the context of the time in which we live in 2026.
And I think we're unfortunately going to expect more terrorism, more terrorist attempts on terrorist incidents rather than less for a variety of reasons, but both the far right and jihadi Islamist groups are gaining in strength. And of course, conditions in the Middle East make it easier for them to recruit and to find somebody to carry out a mission. So all of that is grim.
So we need to brace and prepare for it.
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Chapter 4: How can Australia improve its counter-extremism measures?
There are five confidential recommendations. What do you think they're likely to cover off on?
I think some very specific things about points of failure and how that can be addressed when it comes to the Bondi terror attack. I imagine, I certainly hope that at least one of those recommendations would cover what is often referred to as countering or preventing violent extremism, which sits alongside counterterrorism.
Counterterrorism is the police-led and intelligence-led detection and disruption side of things. So in the case of the Bondi terrorist Shooters, the alleged younger shooter, investigated by ASIO 2019. By 2020, they said he was not a priority.
Chapter 5: What role does a full-time counterterrorism coordinator play?
Somebody should have been keeping an eye on him and just checking in with him and the family on a regular basis. And that would generally fall best under countering violent extremism as opposed to counterterrorism. So I'm hoping that there's a discussion of that there, but it does make sense that that would be done quietly and not part of the public recommendations.
So what would more effective counter-extremism measures look like?
Well, we've got a good example in Victoria. In the city of Melbourne, you've got four community support groups, they're called, the innocuous name, but they work with particular communities. A particular concern historically has been Muslim communities just because of targeting of recruiters.
So these work across four areas in the north and west and south of Melbourne, and they provide a way in which community groups are resourced so that if somebody has a concern, it's generally about a young person, generally about a young man, not exclusively. They can voice their concern.
They can be expert oversight to say, well, okay, we think this is a counselling problem, or we just need some mentoring, or maybe there's just a problem with finding employment, or maybe it's mental health. But they do an assessment, so you don't assume anything.
In rare cases, they find out that there's likely recruitment from a terrorist or a violent extremist recruitment, radicalisation going on. Then they check with state and federal police just to check that there's no ongoing operations, de-conflict. And if necessary, sit down and try and work out what the problem is.
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Chapter 6: How does the war in Iran affect security threats in Australia?
And if you do that early enough, you can generally help them recognize that what they thought was true is not true and take them in a different direction. Recruitment is all about social networks, friendships. So if you can put something positive in some young person's life to replace what seems to be a rising negative influence, you can cut off at the chase.
You mentioned that the report recommends a full-time counterterrorism coordinator. What does that role do and what difference could that make?
Well, you know, go back to the 9-11 Commission report and we saw that, you know, one of the main takeaways there, and it's a familiar story with similar incidents and reports since, is there wasn't adequate communication between the FBI and the CIA. So you need timely and complete information sharing there.
A coordinator, a counterterrorism coordinator, can just facilitate that, partly because it's their dedicated task, but partly because they build trusted relations and they sort of lean in and make sure stuff happens. The particular recommendation in the report is that it's full-time, so that suggests that we've sort of had people drifting in and out of that being their focus.
And I think that's often a problem in government work, including in security areas, that people For a period of time, we prioritize something and then it drops in priority, perhaps the funding, the budget changes. And where you're dealing with stuff that's based on people-to-people relationships and relationships of trust, you can't afford to have any lack of continuity.
One of the recommendations is a review into counterterrorism teams and how they integrate and share information. How important is that and what do you think the review needs to cover?
Well, generally, that working between counterterrorism teams and agencies in Australia does work well, but clearly it's not perfect. And with all of those agencies, there are degrees of rivalries.
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Chapter 7: What are the risks of anti-Semitism being exploited by extremist groups?
On a good day, you've got trusted individuals who really are comfortable working with each other. On a bad day, you've got people who don't get along and resent somebody taking charge. So the best way to overcome that very human and predictable problem is to have full-time counterterrorism coordinator and full-time people assigned to support that.
So they build trust and they just have continuity because you don't know when something bad is going to happen. If you don't have that continuity, you know, things might go along well for a few years and then there's a bit of a changeover. And in that changeover, unbeknownst to you, something's happening and you're not as sharp as you should be as an organization or a series of organizations.
No one organization can do this by itself. No one individual. So sharing in a timely and complete fashion is the key. And everything you can do in terms of systems to put that in place and give people a chance to build relationships and keep them is important.
Coming up, is the Royal Commission moving too slowly in a time of war? If we pull out a bit, Greg, we're about to go into two weeks of hearings about anti-Semitism. Is there a chance that Islamic State could exploit this Royal Commission? Could it actually give it more material to try and recruit Australians to its cause?
Yeah, I'm not so worried about Islamic State exploiting this Royal Commission process.
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Chapter 8: How can Australia effectively engage in a mature public conversation about anti-Semitism?
I'm more worried about the way that we talk about the findings and the process so that we don't give any advantage to Islamic State or al-Qaeda or a far-right group or any other group. What we need to recognize is that we're dealing with two separate but interacting problems. One is anti-Semitism, so just racist, bigotry, hate, and that can be just at a level of personal animosity.
Human beings are very susceptible to this. even more so when they're in groups. So your group identification can lead you to sort of taking a racist, anti-Semitic stance. But violent extremist groups like Al-Qaeda, Islamic State, the far right, neo-Nazi groups do this at a much higher level and often with a much more direct focus on violent attacks.
And they will use global affairs, what's happening in the Middle East, what's happening around the world, to make it easy for them to spin a narrative which helps them to recruit. That intersects with general anti-Semitism, but it's a quite separate thing. We need to be clear to look at both things at once, lest we do harm to efforts on one side by focusing on the other.
So what we know is that the politics in Israel, the actions of the Netanyahu government, have led to a greatly diminished sense of confidence in that government, including across Jewish communities. North America, it's very dramatic, but Europe... And that doesn't automatically generate anti-Semitism.
And if we refer to every criticism of the Israeli government under Netanyahu as anti-Semitic, then we're sort of undermining the ability to fight anti-Semitism. But it does give an opportunity space for both bigots and for terrorists, for violent extremists to step in and try and persuade others to join them.
So we need to sort of just have a very mature public conversation about this, recognising that it's nuanced and that we're going to find people with very different opinions than our own, but they're not necessarily working against us. The temptation is to say, if you don't agree with me, you're part of the problem.
And then we can very easily use the label anti-Semitism and that can actually do damage to trying to fight anti-Semitism.
Do you think, given the current political environment, that we're mature enough to have this conversation, Greg?
Yeah, I believe we are in Australia, but it's one of these things where we've got to lean into a sense of competence in what we've achieved in a multicultural society, one of the most successful in the world, but not perfect. And I think particularly we've got to sort of lean into the political discourse. And when somebody strays a bit, say, just, you know, politely say, look, that's not helping.
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