After Bondi, we crave certainty – but quick fixes are dangerous

2 hours ago 2

Opinion

December 22, 2025 — 5.00am

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.

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 previously advised NSW Police that Naveed Akram had associated with Islamic extremists years before his father, Sajid, had been granted a firearms licence – and long before they took his six legally owned guns to Bondi, fatally shooting 15 people and injuring dozens more. Police, for their part, had long been alert to the possibility that Sydney-based street preachers with Islamic State links might seek indirect access to weapons by targeting licensed gun owners with no criminal or security flags — so-called “cleanskins”. These concerns were real, documented and debated well before Bondi.

Acknowledging that awareness existed isn’t the same as demonstrating that a decisive or lawful intervention was available at the time. Intelligence warnings about associations are rarely binary; they signal elevated concern, not criminal intent. Converting them into licence refusals, detention or surveillance requires legal thresholds that are deliberately high. When those thresholds are lowered in the aftermath of an attack, systems inevitably generate more false positives.

The practical effect was visible days after Bondi, when seven young Muslim men were taken into custody under heightened security settings. Acting at a lower risk threshold enabled precautionary intervention, but the absence of evidence sufficient to sustain charges meant the men had to be released. This is precisely how a system behaves when it trades precision for speed.

That example raises uncomfortable questions about why rapid regulatory changes are now being pushed through with limited analysis, when existing laws appear adequate but imperfectly applied. It also underscores the social cost of operating permanently at heightened thresholds.

Expanding the security net inevitably draws in people who pose no genuine threat, over time eroding trust, co-operation and social cohesion. Bondi, in this sense, exposes not a single missed warning but a structural dilemma: lower thresholds may feel safer, but they often make systems noisier, less effective and ultimately less legitimate.

Each false positive consumes time, resources and attention. Each additional warning sign that is looked for risks overwhelming the system and diverting focus from more credible risks. This isn’t a failure of will or competence. It is a structural reality of risk management in open societies.

Modern terrorism exploits precisely these conditions. It is rarely hierarchical, predictable or linear. Lone actors radicalise through diffuse online ecosystems rather than formal organisations. Ideological influence crosses borders without travel. Violence incubates where grievance, criminality, mental health stressors and extremist narratives intersect. Responsibility for managing these risks is dispersed among agencies, jurisdictions and levels of government that were never designed to function as a single, seamless system.

Intelligence reflects this complexity. It is probabilistic, incomplete and often ambiguous, built from fragments that appear coherent only once violence has already occurred. Policing operates within deliberate legal and ethical constraints that privilege civil liberties over omniscience. Expecting either system to deliver perfect foresight is not a serious standard of accountability; it is a retrospective fantasy.

None of this means failure should be excused. But it does mean failure must be understood properly. What is often labelled an “intelligence failure” or a “policing failure” is more accurately a systems failure: a mismatch between how contemporary risk behaves and how our institutions are designed to detect, share and manage it.

The danger after Bondi isn’t only that we ask the wrong questions but that we answer them too quickly. Symbolic policymaking may reassure anxious electorates, but it rarely improves security outcomes. At best, it costs money and buys false confidence. At worst, it introduces new vulnerabilities, distorts operational priorities and makes already complex systems harder to manage.

Accountability, if it’s to mean anything, must be architectural rather than punitive. Reviews, inquiries and even royal commissions add value only if they are disciplined in scope and clear in purpose: to identify structural weaknesses, improve information flows and strengthen risk management. Performed poorly, they risk becoming expensive exercises in reassurance that deliver neither safety nor trust.

There is also a temptation, after attacks such as Bondi, to promise absolute security. That temptation should be resisted. No open society can guarantee perfect safety without eroding the freedoms that terrorism seeks to undermine. The real task is harder and more important: building adaptive systems capable of operating under uncertainty, learning continuously rather than episodically, and strengthening social resilience alongside security capability.

Terrorism isn’t only an attack on lives, it is also an attack on confidence – confidence in institutions, in social trust and in the idea that democracies can remain both secure and free. If Bondi becomes just another episode of blame followed by forgetfulness, we’ll have failed ourselves. If instead it becomes a catalyst for serious, evidence-based reform, Australia may yet emerge stronger and more resilient.

John Coyne is director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s national security programs.

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