The announcement of a royal commission into the Bondi attack is welcome.

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In addition to focusing on the event itself, it should probe the uncomfortable question of what should Australia have done over the past two years to prevent this moment - and why it was not done.

Anti-Semitism in Australia has been increasingly overt in the two years since October 7, 2023. We have seen it in schools, on university campuses, in workplaces and on social media, and in successive mass protests in capital cities.

Jewish Australians have reported harassment, intimidation, vandalism and vilification.

Much of this resurgent anti-Semitism has been documented by community organisations, recorded by the police, and tracked by our intelligence agencies. It didn't emerge suddenly. It was a trend.

But in institutional terms, Australia treated it as episodic rather than systemic, as cultural rather than ideological, and as a social irritation rather than a security concern.

This framing mattered because in shaping what governments thought the problem was, it led to four key failures in their response.

The first failure was that political leaders struggled to name the problem and to speak clearly about what was happening.

Anti-Semitism was routinely folded into generic language about "racism", "community tensions" or "polarisation".

Instead of acknowledging that Jews were being targeted because they were Jews, politicians blurred the problem into a broader narrative of grievance.

What Australia needed was a clear and explicit political statement that anti-Semitism was a growing and distinct problem requiring a focused response, backed by a formal national definition, consistent ministerial language and a reporting framework that allowed it to be tracked properly across agencies.

Failure to name led to failure to prioritise the problem.

And this led to the second key failure: a lack of institutional........

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