After the massacre at Bondi on December 14, the Prime Minister led the chorus of “this is un-Australian” with an antiphon of “how could this have happened here?”
These sentiments, emitted by a notoriously unsophisticated wordsmith, were apparently intended to provide a mise en scene in which poor innocent Australia was struck by dastardly terrorists whose actions were beyond understanding, let alone prediction.
The slightest enquiry reveals a recent history in which the most likely result was going to be an attack by crazed jihadists on a soft target Jewish gathering.
Item one must be the Al Madina Dawah Centre in Bankstown, where the Muslim cleric Wissam Haddad was known from at least 2017 to have influenced the younger of the alleged gunmen.
Haddad has been preaching hatred of the Jewish people for a prolonged period – in sermons, sanitised as “lectures”, that were then communicated to a wider audience by social media.
This was public knowledge once ABC Four Corners ran a program on Al Madina and Haddad in April 2025. The level of hatred and the degree of incitement in the context of sermons were immediately alarming:
“[Jews are] a treacherous people, a vile people.
Towards the end of times, when the Muslims will be fighting the Jews, the trees will speak, the stone will speak, and they will say, ‘O Muslim, O believer, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him’.”
Security services and the police, Federal and NSW, didn’t blink, but the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission stripped the Al Madina van, used for street preaching, of its charitable status.
Those with a keen interest, at the very least the Jewish community, must have been watching this with bated breath. In fact, according to The Sydney Morning Herald, repeated warnings about radical Islamic preachers were given to law enforcement agencies by Jewish groups. Nothing happened.
The Four Corners program was heavily reliant on the information given to it by “Marcus”, a former ASIO agent who had infiltrated the organisation at Al Madina. He was now in hiding for fear of retribution, a fear exacerbated as he was now playing the role of whistleblower. If the present Commonwealth government is true to form it will come after him.
By July 2025, Al Madina and Haddad’s social media spew had been further contained by Federal Court orders made by Justice Angus Stewart: Wertheim v Haddad [2025] FCA 720, Peter Wertheim being a co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
Drawing on the judgment summary, we find the court rejected Haddad’s and Al Madina’s reliance on section 18D of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth) because the sermons were not delivered “reasonably and in good faith”.
Haddad had sought to justify the sermons on the basis that he was preaching from Qur’anic commentaries, but the expert witnesses on Islamic theology from both sides agreed that neither the Qur’an nor the Hadith taught that Jews have any inherent negative qualities as a people.
Sheikh Ibrahim, Haddad’s expert, said that “Islam does not encourage hatred towards Jews”.
The court found that Haddad and Al Madina contravened section 18C of the RDA by delivering and publishing the sermons, and made declarations to that effect, ordering the respondents to remove them from their social media.
The court restrained Haddad from causing words, sounds or images to be communicated otherwise than in private, which attribute characteristics to Jewish people on the basis of their group membership and which convey any of the disparaging imputations identified as being conveyed by the sermons.
So much for Jewish self-help. What was the government doing? The Commonwealth Criminal Code 1995 provides (as amended and commencing on February 8, 2025):
80.2A Advocating force or violence against groups
Offences
(1) A person (the first person) commits an offence if:
(a) the first person advocates the use of force or violence against a group (the targeted group); and
(b) the first person does so reckless as to whether force or violence will occur; and
(c) the targeted group is distinguished by race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, intersex status, disability, nationality, national or ethnic origin or political opinion; and
(d) the use of the force or violence would threaten the peace, order and good government of the Commonwealth.
Penalty: Imprisonment for 7 years.
You’d think the sermon about trees and stones demanding the killing of the hidden Jews would fall in the category of at least “recklessly … advocating force or violence against groups”.
“Recklessness” replacing “intention” was a major part of the February 2025 amendment – but from security services, police and the DPP, nada.
All was quiet on the Western Suburbs Front. It should be noted that Haddad vehemently denies any connection to the massacre at Bondi and has distanced himself from connection in recent years to the younger alleged gunman.
The outrage aimed at Albanese and his government at this point is understandable, but to a degree misplaced, as the independence of the police and prosecution service from political direction is a prized constitutional artefact.
That Albanese and his ministers could not directly order action to be taken against Haddad for his preaching does not entirely absolve them from culpability.
They are in a prime position to set the tone by which the arresting/prosecuting services measure their discretionary powers.
An analogy for what seems to have happened may be seen in the recent grooming gang scandals in the UK, where gangs of mostly Pakistani-originated men preyed on homeless girls and young women. This was known to police, but nothing was done for too long to avoid the optics of picking on an ethnic group.
The Albanese government is now trapped with the appearance that it looked on while a preventable train wreck was unfolding. It made no post-2025 election policies that matched the decisions against Haddad and Al Madina taken by the Charities and Not-for-profits Commission and the Federal Court.
That raised the inference that it crossed its fingers, hoping for the best, as decisive action might be electorally unpalatable in Sydney’s western suburban seats with large Muslim populations – where Muslim political parties are being bruited.
Which takes us to an even deeper malaise within Albanese’s government. The able Attorney General who pushed through the amendments to the Criminal Code in February 2025, Mark Dreyfus KC, was no longer there after the May election.
Both the moderate Muslim minister Ed Husic and Dreyfus, a front-rank barrister, were sacrificed for internal Labor Party machinations, Dreyfus to be replaced by a non-entity.
None of that was in the public interest, but swollen with hubris after a smashing electoral victory, the Labor Party had no time for reflection. The Prime Minister spent not a penny of political capital to keep the counsel of two very capable and valuable ministers who could be expected to have advised on the growing community tensions.
The finale in all this can only be described as bathos. Shortly after the Bondi shootings, Canterbury-Bankstown Council closed the Al Madina Centre on the grounds that it had planning permission as a medical centre, but was apparently improperly being used as a prayer hall.
All the King’s forces and all the King’s men, both Commonwealth and New South Wales, had been unable to grasp this nettle, but the lowest rung on the ladder of government did it in a trice.
Reading The Sydney Morning Herald’s account of the closure leaves one gasping at the political vapidity:
NSW Premier Chris Minns said the state government supported “all action to clamp down on those inciting hate”, praising the actions of the council and Canterbury-Bankstown Mayor Bilal El-Hayek in closing the facility.
“We are ready to make significant changes to prevent hate preachers or anyone else inciting violence in our communities.”
Minns added the government would use planning law or hate speech reforms to send a message to those “putting hate in people’s heart” that they will be met with the full force of the law.
The community, both Jewish and everyone else, deserve better than the beating of wings accompanying proclamations of tougher laws to come. The laws against hate-speech that incite sectarian murder were already in place.
No one was executing them.