Let’s not pretend. Australia is experiencing a significant crisis of identity and culture. The multicultural mantra – ‘many in one’ – is being sorely tested by events like the politically motivated attacks in Bondi and Perth.
And it was an Australian who perpetrated the Mosque attack in Christchurch in 2019, resulting in the deaths of 51 people.
In its efforts to salve the impact of Bondi and fortify the multicultural mantra, the Albanese Government has—
1. Introduced new hate-speech laws
2. Welcomed Israeli president Isaac Herzog into Australia
3. Announced a Royal Commission into the Bondi attacks.
Among these measures, the Royal Commission into the Bondi shootings is the most financially imposing at $30-60 million. That’s far less than the Albanese Government’s other great cultural enterprise, the failed Voice Referendum ($450m).
So, the taxpayers will rightly ask—will the Royal Commission prove more successful than the Referendum in healing social divisions and fortifying multiculturalism?
Or will the cultural fractures and hate continue to deepen beneath the veneer of government authority and legal process?
To a large extent, the answer to these questions depends on the perspective of different community groups (the many) which comprise the Australian ‘public’ (the one).
Jewish communities that were most directly targeted and affected in the Bondi attacks will feel somewhat gratified by the government’s willingness to undertake a Royal Commission. However, it’s unlikely the Commission findings—whatever they are— will appease the ongoing harm that resonates from this sort of targeted violence.
Many Jewish leaders and community members, in fact, locate the Bondi violence within a more pervasive and Gentile history of anti-Semitism. According to this perspective, anti-Semitism is a feature of an Australian culture which lies just beneath the surface of multicultural platitudes.
Equally, though, many Muslim and other non-Jewish Australians believe that the Royal Commission and the Isaac Herzog visit are veils for Islamophobia.
The Bondi attack was a heinous crime. But Government and Opposition responses risk a shift in the cultural balance. The predictable violence associated with Herzog’s visit yet again exposes the vulnerability of Australia’s propagated ‘social cohesion’.
Herzog and the Royal Commission might seem to endorse the Israeli government’s retributive genocide in Gaza.
This Islam-Jewish cultural and religious divide, though, is only one dimension of the fractures in Australia’s social cohesion. An assembly of Right Wing Extremist groups (RWE) work to expose and exploit the cultural divisions of other groups in order to promote their own political interests.
While the Albanese Government has tried to suppress RWE through hate speech legislation, our own research has shown how adaptable and resilient these groups can be.
Working through clandestine media systems and global networks, RWE work invisibly to destabilize the ideology of national cohesion.
It’s unlikely that the Royal Commission will do anything more than recommend further legislative controls on these groups through the surface suppression of hateful media speech. It will do very little to address the deep seated, inter-group hatred that RWE exploits for its own political ends.
This underlying problem is inscribed in multiculturalism. Long term residents and more recent arrivals carry the best and the worst of their respective cultural histories. The ideals of social cohesion refuse to acknowledge this problem—particularly in relation to historic enmities and prejudices.
But as Bondi represents, this problem is always in danger of revealing itself.
It goes some way to explain the collapsing electoral support for the Coalition Opposition. The splinter of the Nationals and Liberals over hate speech legislation, and the gathering popularity of One Nation—represent these deeper cultural divisions in Australia.
We know something is wrong. Terribly wrong. And we’re finding it increasingly difficult to heal ourselves. We look to government which appears to be perpetually chasing its tail.
Public Opinion Polls following the Bondi shootings certainly indicate a level of dissatisfaction with the Prime Minister over the Royal Commission issue. A majority of citizens appear to have become convinced by the unholy alliance of the Jewish leadership, Greens and the Coalition that a Royal Commission was a commensurate response to the atrocity.
We can reasonably assume that the poll respondents felt that a Commission would demonstrate national respect for the Jewish community. Respondents to the poll probably also felt that a Commission might usefully explain how Australia is going wrong.
The problem is—the Royal Commission is unlikely to produce findings beyond everything we already know.
We already know that there were failings in the national security system, particularly in relation to the two perpetrators of the atrocity. We also understand that the motivations for the shootings are linked to religious extremism and the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
We know that the victims of the shooting are not directly responsible for, or connected to, the Israeli regime.
Less obviously, the Bondi attacks are related to the issues we’ve raised in this article. That is: the fracturing of Australia’s multicultural project, and the Government’s inability to control culture and hate.
We’re not talking about the mediated expression of hate speech. We mean, rather, the complex dynamic of inter-group disputes and contentions that for a range of reasons evolve into antagonism, hatred and ultimately violence.
With its plenitude of well-paid lawyers and legal powers, the Royal Commission has little ability to address these cultural dynamics—nor understand the feelings and imaginings that drive them.
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