Opinion
After a week of mass-murder and terror, we must take a look in the mirror
Peter Hartcher
Political and international editorAnthony Albanese expected that the week would be dominated by the unveiling of the government’s new defence strategy. But as the prime minister boarded his flight from Sydney to Canberra last Saturday afternoon, the first word came through from the Australian Federal Police that there was some sort of serious disturbance under way in Bondi Junction. By the time he touched down, it was clear that Australia’s internal and external security would both be on the agenda.
Mass murder by a knife-wielding psychotic in a Westfield shopping mall was “a terrible, terrible incident that caused extraordinary distress”, Albanese tells me, and “the Sydney community was fragile” in the aftermath.
In his Saturday evening press conference, he intimated that the coming days would be difficult, but he had no idea how difficult.
The community was tested again just 48 hours later. Another stabbing with murderous intent, this time classified as an Islamist terrorist attack and aimed at an Assyrian Christian bishop during a live-streamed broadcast, immediately followed by mob violence of mindlessness in suburban Sydney targeting the angels of our ambulance service and the protectors of the peace.
Australia has experienced each of these types of events separately in the past, but all coinciding in the one city in one 36-hour span? The authorities say there was no specific connection. But was there something in the ether or were they truly compartmentalised?
“Even if they are all separate,” says Albanese, “they add to a social environment which makes issues difficult.” He goes on to describe the compounding concerns that have unnerved swaths of Australia: “There’s no doubt there’s been a rise in antisemitism, there’s been a rise in Islamophobia, there are people who are concerned about what is happening internationally, there are some who are translating that into issues in Australia.
“And you have a cultural issue with social media and, as well, you have a media ecosystem which is invested, often, in hyperbole and certainty where certainty doesn’t exist.”
What’s he getting at here? “The Middle East is a complex situation that can’t be reduced to slogans.”
You might add other background sources of community anxiety: the crescendo of climate change consternation, the drumbeat of global war talk, and the catastrophising in much of the reporting of all these problems.
The net result? “You can’t take community cohesion for granted,” summarises the prime minister. Nor community safety, as a corollary, I’d add.
The director-general of security, ASIO’s Mike Burgess, has warned Australia of security threats external and internal. An enemy state, he says, is prowling Australia’s cyber systems for sabotage openings, and an enemy state constantly seeks to subvert the political system through influence networks.
Illustration: Jim Pavlidis
He was too diplomatic to name the hostile state, although the national defence strategy this week frankly named China as the source of destabilisation to which Australia must respond. But the ASIO chief nominated two internal sources of threat. First, “Sunni violent extremism poses the greatest religiously motivated violent extremist threat in Australia”. Second, there was, he said, a rising risk of extremist nationalist violence seeking to provoke a “race war” within Australia. In other words, neo-Nazis and their kin.
The Bondi Junction murders, as far as we know, were psychotic, not political; random, not religious. But the background level of social stress can’t be a calming influence on anyone, and potentially an aggravating influence on disturbed minds. And it magnifies the consequences of any outbreak.
For Australia, a violently riven community is an existential threat. We are the most multicultural among the substantial developed nations, with double the US proportion of immigrants, for example.
Albanese did his best this week to calm and console a shaken society. The opposition critiques of his performance – that he should have named the terrorist as an Islamist sooner, for instance – are querulous. But what to do to prevent further violence? What’s the policy agenda?
The first point is what the government can’t achieve. Australia can’t stop the war in Gaza. Albanese says: “We are not in control, we can have little impact on what is happening in Gaza or in Israel. We can promote social cohesion here and ensure what overwhelmingly a majority of Australians want – which is for those conflicts not to be brought here.”
In that cause, what can be done? The Albanese government was already moving to civilise perhaps the greatest threat to civilisation – the so-called “social media” companies that traffic in social misery. Meta, X, Google, Apple and Microsoft have opened a vector into the very heart of civilised societies for the most depraved and evil forces on Earth.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant says that these enormous corporations are providing “the holy grail for paedophiles”.
“They can store videos and images of child sexual services for free and with no risk of detection. I can’t tell you how important these end-user managed hosting services are,” she told me last month.
Inman Grant points out that these businesses are actually doing less to prevent harm than they were doing 20 years ago. They won’t even apply their own in-house scanning programs to filter out the most harmful content from their own platforms.
The European Union’s chief enforcement officer has had enough. The EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, who was in Australia for talks with Inman Grant, is proposing new laws for the EU: “The internet companies have to be responsible for what kind of crimes they are enabling on their platforms.”
Beyond trafficking in paedophilia, the social misery companies are the primary vehicle for sowing distress, misinformation, extremism and conflict. Albanese identifies this industry as the first priority for action.
He says Inman Grant has directed Facebook – owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta – and X – owned by Elon Musk — to take down “extraordinarily distressing footage” of both the Bondi murders and the violence at the church in south-western Sydney’s Wakeley. These platforms also allowed “falsehoods” about the two incidents “to be spread at scale”, says Albanese, magnifying their consequences.
He first spoke about the harm that “social media” does to democracy by driving polarisation in a 2019 speech he gave as opposition leader. Now, Albanese says, the government is prepared to legislate as necessary.
In other areas of policy, there’s been a clamour of ideas in recent days. NSW Police is asking for greater powers to search people for knives, using portable metal detectors, as Queensland allows with its “wanding” law. They’re also proposing that parents be held criminally responsible for their children carrying knives.
Federally, Bill Shorten on Friday proposed that police patrol Westfield shopping centres, with the owners paying for their services. He didn’t explain who should police churches. The civil liberty objections to all these ideas are obvious.
I ask Albanese what policy responses are needed beyond “social media” reform. Mental health systems, deradicalisation programs, gun and knife controls, police and intelligence powers? His answer: “All of the above.”
But Albanese resists the rush to instant solutions. “What will happen after an incident like this is there will be a review. It needs to be a considered review.” It’s likely to be a joint state-federal review, he says, but that’s yet to be decided.
“So we need to respond in a considered way. In order to achieve the best outcome rather than immediately jumping to conclusions, we need to ensure that we listen to all the experts out there.”
He also makes the point that while flaws must be fixed, Australia’s successes should be affirmed. Among those, he counts the speed of the response of the NSW police and ambulance services, the ready availability of mental health counsellors afoot and highly visible in Bondi Junction as soon as Sunday, the swiftness, less visible, of the AFP and ASIO, and the many acts of heroism.
And truly valuing the social harmony that is the overwhelming experience of Australia. The country’s first Italian-Australian prime minister offers his inner-west Sydney home suburb of Marrickville as a microcosm of healthy multiculturalism: “It’s in the nature of the place – there’s the Muslim Alawi Centre, St Brigid’s Catholic Church, down the road in Tempe there’s the Indonesian mosque, there’s the Anglican church next to my electoral office, around the corner is the Greek Orthodox Church, the Maronite school, the synagogue nearby in Newtown, all living side by side in harmony. That’s the strength of it, it’s part of the attraction of the place.”
Affirmed, fixed, not taken for granted.
Peter Hartcher is political editor.