Echoes of Lindt inquest in Bondi inquiry: Security chiefs must accept scrutiny |
Echoes of Lindt inquest in Bondi inquiry: Security chiefs must accept scrutiny
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When news broke of the profoundly shocking massacre at Bondi on December 14 last year, my thoughts flew to an event that had occurred almost exactly 11 years earlier, on December 15, 2014. It was then that Islamic State-inspired gunman Man Haron Monis took 18 people hostage at Sydney’s Lindt cafe, the ensuing stand-off with police ultimately costing the lives of two of those hostages and the wounding of three others.
The scale of the Bondi attack was even more horrifying – 15 dead, 40 wounded, including children and the elderly.
But for those of us who’d sat through the Lindt inquest, disquieting echoes are already emerging from the interim report of Justice Virginia Bell’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, which landed on Thursday.
First, the estimation of risk. In the case of Lindt, police fell into the trap of complacency. Monis’ increasingly wild posts on social media prompted 18 calls to the national security hotline in the week before he launched the attack, which were blithely played down by security agencies. On the night of the siege, police convinced themselves that Monis was a narcissist who could be waited out, not the psychopathic killer he proved to be.
In the case of the Bondi atrocity, the judgment of NSW police is again being called into question.
How carefully, for instance, did they assess the vulnerability of an outdoor and widely publicised event such as Chanukah by the Sea, a mass gathering to celebrate a........