Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has so far resisted calls for a royal commission into the Bondi terrorist attack but this week indicated he may change his mind. Photo: Thomas Lucraft.
Stop the press: Vampire Diaries star Nathaniel Buzolic is calling for a royal commission into the Bondi terrorist attack.
So too are billionaire James Packer, Olympian Dawn Fraser and AFL personality Sam Newman.
But before Sky News goes hunting for one of the Daddo brothers to round out the panel, it’s worth asking a simple question: does anyone actually understand what a royal commission is supposed to achieve?
Recent history suggests these vast, expensive national inquiries rarely hold power to account or produce meaningful, lasting change.
It’s clear sections of the Murdoch media want heads to roll, blaming the Albanese Government for alleged intelligence failures and a supposed reluctance to confront antisemitism. But their campaign for a royal commission is unlikely to deliver the reckoning they’re demanding.
A royal commission creates a powerful-looking but ultimately unaccountable bureaucracy. It can compel witnesses, demand documents and generate headlines.
What it can’t do is lay criminal charges, impose sanctions, force resignations or change government policy.
Take the Royal Commission into Robodebt. Its findings were devastating. The inquiry branded the Coalition’s automated welfare debt scheme “cruel” and “unlawful”, concluding it created pressure and despair that contributed to some victims taking their own lives.
Yet not a single politician or senior bureaucrat involved has faced serious consequences as a result.
Before that came the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It ran for five years, cost taxpayers about $340 million and produced 409 recommendations in a final report handed down in 2017 — many of which remain unimplemented almost a decade later.
Its crowning achievement was the creation of a National Redress Scheme to compensate survivors abused in institutional care.
That scheme has since been described by victim advocates as an “unmitigated disaster”: painfully slow, inadequately funded and so backlogged that elderly applicants are dying before receiving an outcome. The result? Yet another inquiry into something that itself resulted from an inquiry.
Despite this, there has been scant sustained media pressure on governments to fix the redress system. Attention has moved on — now firmly locked on Bondi, its aftermath and antisemitism.
Even Nate Buzolic can’t convince me we need a royal commission. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
And that’s the fundamental flaw with royal commissions. They take years to conclude and by the time the final report lands, public outrage has dissipated and journalists have lost interest.
A Bondi inquiry won’t be able to start until criminal proceedings are finalised, so we’d be lucky to see any results before 2028. By then, the political pressure will be far weaker — drowned out by cost-of-living pain, power prices and the next culture war.
It’s also no coincidence the child abuse royal commission focused heavily on the Catholic Church and elite private schools, while paying comparatively little attention to scandals involving children in state care — failures for which governments themselves bear responsibility.
That’s not accidental. Governments set the terms of reference. Governments appoint the commissioners. Governments create the bureaucracies that run these inquiries.
Those bureaucracies are staffed by professionals with experience in the very systems under examination — counterterrorism, policing, immigration vetting, protest monitoring. Many come from major government agencies. Their roles are temporary. Within a year or two, they’ll be looking for their next job — quite possibly back inside government.
How eager would you be to make findings that embarrass your future employer?
So please be honest if you’re demanding a royal commission. They make for excellent television, righteous press conferences and the comforting illusion of action.
Just don’t confuse noise with accountability.
The millions of dollars that would be spent on a royal commission into the Bondi terrorist attack would likely save more lives if directed toward frontline services and improved intelligence coordination.
Royal commissions don’t deliver justice — they deliver reports. And by the time the final volume is gathering dust on a shelf in Canberra, today’s outrage will have been replaced by tomorrow’s moral panic and the same voices demanding answers will be back on Sky News, searching for a new villain.
