Australians want answers and reassurance. They want to believe that tragedy could have been prevented if only someone had acted differently. Politics amplifies that instinct, demanding decisive action, new laws and visible accountability. But when outrage rather than evidence drives the response, the result is often policy theatre: expensive, symbolic measures that feel decisive but do little to improve safety.

Blame-hunting hysterics and rage-baiting serve a nation poorly. They collapse complex security systems into simplistic villains and they reward hindsight certainty over serious analysis. Worse still is the rush to quick-fire policy development untethered from evidence – legislative and regulatory changes designed to signal action rather than solve problems. Such responses may calm public anxiety in the short term, but they rarely make Australia safer.

Illustration by Jozsef Benke Credit:

One of the hardest truths to accept after terrorist attacks such as that at Bondi is how misleading hindsight can be. Looking back, it seems clear that some obvious intervention was needed. “Why didn’t they act?” The question feels compelling.

But prevention doesn’t work that way.

After the fact, certain details inevitably loom larger. Travel patterns that now raise concern seem self-evident. Associations that appear marginal suddenly feel decisive. Yet before the attack, authorities would have needed to cast an exponentially wider net, covering individuals with extremist views, those previously assessed by intelligence agencies, their families and their associates, to detect a single person of concern. That approach generates vast numbers of false positives: people who trigger suspicion but who pose no genuine threat.

Reporting in this masthead has revealed that intelligence agencies were not blind to extremist risk in the abstract. ASIO had........

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