A royal commission into Bondi should be wide and open |
Any journalist worth her salt should be in favour of a royal commission into anything controversial or newsworthy, as the Bondi massacre and the quality of our police and security agencies are. Inquiries, particularly open inquiries, produce news, and, as often as not, conflict, which is the stuff of most political news. There is an adage in politics that one should never commission an inquiry into any question to which you don't already know the answer. But even then, and regardless of how carefully you frame the terms of reference, inquiries often produce surprises that were not part of the intended script.
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That said, if I were to hold a federal royal commission into the Bondi massacre, I would be rather more focused on examining whether the order of battle and disposition of our police and security agencies are as they should be, the quality of their leadership and the thinking their discipline involves, their flexibility in response to unexpected events, and the way they have adapted to change. Only in passing would that focus on what was known to any of the agencies about those involved in the massacre, what they ought to have known or realise, or whether, as Josh Frydenberg has very unconvincingly alleged, the Prime Minister is personally responsible for creating the circumstances in which the massacre could occur.
And if I were to have a royal commission, I would not be inviting Dennis Richardson to conduct it. Richardson is a grand old man of the Australian intelligence community, a great man of indisputable integrity and is given to speaking his mind. All of which might be thought to embrace the detachment and integrity that such an inquiry would warrant. But he is not detached, and he could hardly be called sufficiently independent. That is not to suggest anything bad about him at all, other than to say that his fingerprints are all over the organisational shape and the way of thinking of many of the agencies involved in security intelligence, particularly ASIO. In a very real sense, he would be investigating himself.
He once led ASIO, and at a critical time when it was reorganising itself to face outside terrorism rather than espionage and politically motivated violence. That was both before and after September 11, 2001. At various stages since, he has conducted reviews of what ASIO has been doing. A good many have never publicly surfaced, but that governments have repeatedly come back to him suggests both that they (and relevant agencies, including ASIO itself) accepted his reports, including any criticisms, and adapted the organisation along lines he had recommended.
His experience in diplomacy as ambassador to the US during the Bush (and Guantanamo Bay years), as head of the Defence department and as an agency chief with a keen and regular need for current intelligence and security information has made a very well-informed insider in the entire security and intelligence establishment. He has had a close working relationship with the Australian Federal Police in its counter terrorism functions and in its ordinary operational roles. He has been a good friend, an influence, adviser and mentor of almost all the senior police and intelligence figures of the past three decades. If there are any criticisms to make of any agency or any leader, the subject of it could well respond reproachfully, "Why didn't you say that before?"
It should be clear from the foregoing that Richardson is uniquely qualified to know and judge police and security intelligence matters. He has an open mind and is never immune to argument, even if public servants and ministers have quailed before him. But I do not expect that one would find from him new and fresh ideas about how the intelligence community should work, an outsider's capacity to put aside earlier (defensible) judgements and to consider other ways of approaching critical issues. The Australian security community has many more coercive powers than any equivalent community in the western alliance, and Richardson has, for example, always tended to support the granting of them. That he was himself, and that most of his........