EXCLUSIVE – GEOFF CHAMBERS JANET ALBRECHTSEN
From the front page of The Australian December 24 2025
Anthony Albanese and his senior ministers have been accused of “wilful blindness” in responding to warnings from security chiefs on anti-Semitism and extremism, as police, security and intelligence personnel fear they will be made scapegoats by the government.
Multiple security sources have told The Australian that the Albanese government’s “permissive” approach to the scourge of anti-Semitism, lack of urgency in response to extremist threats and failure to adequately resource security and intelligence agencies cannot escape scrutiny following the Bondi Beach terrorist attack.
The decision by the Prime Minister to reject a royal commission and order a review into federal law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, led by respected former public servant Dennis Richardson, has angered under-pressure security personnel who are concerned the government is “throwing them under the bus” to deflect from its inaction on anti-Semitism.
The Australian can reveal that well before Islamic State-inspired extremists murdered Jewish-Australians in the nation’s worst terrorist attack, the Albanese government was warned by security chiefs that existing anti-vilification and hate speech laws were too weak and that thresholds for prosecution must be lowered.
A senior law enforcement figure – who The Australian has called Morgan D to protect their identity – writes in The Australian: “Government leaders now speak as though the terrorist attack at Bondi Beach came without warning, as if there were no signs, no escalating threats, no atmosphere of danger – as if it emerged from nowhere.
“The truth is unmistakeable: the alarm bells were ringing long ago. The October 9, 2023, protest at the Sydney Opera House, the 300 per cent rise in harassment, threats and assaults against Jewish Australians; the arson and vandalism of Jewish businesses, schools and places of worship; the anti-Semitism on university campuses, the unchecked hate speech, the weekly protest marches calling for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people.
“And the repeated briefings, particularly to Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, from security agencies all pointed to a growing and foreseeable threat.
“There is a legal term for ignoring such warnings: wilful blindness, when someone deliberately avoids knowing the truth so they can later claim ignorance. It is about accountability for choosing not to see what is in front of them.”
Prominent national security figures told The Australian the Albanese government did not have a “real focus on national security” and that the security architecture and personnel had been degraded since the 2022 election, when Labor came to power.
Mr Albanese on Tuesday defended his relationship with law-enforcement and intelligence agencies after being asked about concerns in the national security community that the government was deflecting from its mistakes on anti-Semitism.
He would not confirm whether his government had enacted all recommendations made in Mr Richardson’s exhaustive 2019 review of the legal framework of the national intelligence community.
“I actually sit on the National Security Committee,” Mr Albanese said. “That consists of the leadership of the national security community, and we are working in lock-step with the national security leadership of this country. We provide every support for them and no one should undermine them.”
The Australian understands the terms of reference for the new Richardson inquiry will make clear that the review is independent and not controlled by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Mr Richardson, who is known for his frank advice to governments, is not expected to be required to report to DPMC secretary Steven Kennedy.
The voluminous Richardson review of the legal framework of the national intelligence community, which included classified recommendations, was acknowledged by a Morrison government response in December 2020 but has not been fully implemented by the Albanese government.
Security sources said inadequate resources and the government’s failure to modernise legislation and give more powers to national security agencies in the digital age had heaped stress on federal police and intelligence officers. With security agencies and departments undergoing expensive digital transformations and systems upgrades, security insiders said funding was being shifted away from core priorities at a time when the threat environment was rapidly deteriorating and becoming more sophisticated.
Former head of the Office of National Intelligence and Australian Secret Intelligence Service, Nick Warner, last week told The Australian that “scapegoating the intelligence community is a cop out”. Former ASIO director-general Duncan Lewis and Mr Richardson also called for greater resources for security agencies.
In the article published in The Australian, Morgan D writes that “the police investigation remains in its early stages and will require months of detailed work, in Australia and overseas, to establish the full sequence of events”.
“Only once the investigation is complete will we have the evidence necessary to identify any system or policy failures,” Morgan D writes. “Premature decision-making, in the absence of all relevant facts, risks undermining the integrity and effectiveness of any subsequent reforms.
“An inquiry into the circumstances leading to the Bondi attack is essential. It should not be a witch-hunt; if conducted independently, it can help shape evidence-based government policy and determine whether agencies are adequately resourced, whether current information-sharing protocols are effective, where operational improvements and capabilities are needed, and determine whether immigration settings are keeping pace with evolving global threat dynamics.”
Citing the core issue as being the “failure to recognise, confront and act decisively against escalating extremist ideology and anti-Semitism”, Morgan D criticises the political crackdown on gun laws and punishment of “law-abiding Australians”.
“This defies logic. It is the policy equivalent of confiscating the knives from the local butcher because someone was stabbed in the next town,” Morgan D writes.
“This issue is not about gun control. It is about leadership, anti-Semitism and confronting radical Islamist extremism – about successive governments and agencies avoiding hard truths, prioritising political optics over national security and failing to properly resource the systems designed to protect Australians.
“Any errors within these agencies should be recognised as organisational failures, not individual ones. The people working in these environments are dedicated Australians doing their best despite chronic under-resourcing, underfunding and operating in a high-threat landscape where the margin for error is almost non-existent.”
The Albanese government’s move to strengthen anti-vilification and hate-speech laws following the Bondi terror attack came after advice was received from law-enforcement heads about deficiencies in legal thresholds being manipulated by extremists. The government was told that action against individuals engaged in anti-Semitism could not be progressed because existing laws did not reach the threshold required by the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions.
AFP commissioner Krissy Barrett said last week the “challenge has been around some of the thresholds and we certainly welcome the reform around the thresholds, which will allow us to apply the legislation”.
The Australian last week also revealed the Albanese government downgraded a network of “eyes and ears” across immigrant communities designed to identify problems that could lead to Islamist terror attacks. Home Affairs’ community liaison officers were removed from the department’s national security group in late 2022, and have been stripped of their role of reporting on emerging frictions in key diaspora communities since 2018.
ASIO director-general Mike Burgess said on Sunday that if ASIO was found to have made mistakes, “we will own them and we will learn from them”.
“I welcome scrutiny and embrace accountability, but some of the recent criticisms of ASIO have been unfounded,” he said. “The review provides an opportunity for us to refute claims such as we failed to pass on relevant intelligence, defunded and deprioritised counter-terrorism, and ‘purged’ our experienced counter-terrorism officers. None of these claims are true.”
ANU strategic and defence studies centre professor John Blaxland said he was not convinced the Bondi shooting could have been identified in advance, given the perpetrators were likely to have been conscious of being detected. “What’s happened is the detection thresholds are getting lower and lower – it’s got very, very difficult to detect these kinds of incidents in advance,” Mr Blaxland warned.
Former Defence Department deputy secretary Peter Jennings said the Richardson inquiry appeared “hasty”.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING: JACK QUAIL
A shocking way to end the year
EDUCATION, A LIFE FORCE 