When the Tail Wags the Dog in National Security: The Royal Commission Refusal

In the days after a national trauma, governments face two tests at once. One is operational: did the machinery of prevention and response work, and if not, why not. The other is constitutional: who, exactly, gets to decide how the country answers for failure.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s rationale for rejecting a royal commission into the Bondi attack has brought that second test into sharp relief. He has pointed to the views of security and intelligence leadership—presented as expert counsel—as part of the basis for declining the most powerful and public form of inquiry Australia can convene. It is an argument that sounds prudent on its face. It is also, in a liberal democracy, structurally dangerous.

The problem isn’t that intelligence chiefs should never be heard. Governments must listen to the agencies that bear responsibility for threat assessment, information-sharing, watchlists, and operational coordination. The problem is allowing those agencies to shape, in effect, the architecture of accountability—especially when they may be within the zone of scrutiny. That is not just a political misstep. It is a category error.

Intelligence services are not designed to be arbiters of public accountability. They are designed to collect information, run covert capabilities, protect sources, and act within a legal framework set by elected officials. Their culture is necessarily closed, their incentives necessarily conservative, and their reflexes necessarily protective of operational secrecy. Those characteristics can be essential for security. They are corrosive, however, when applied to the question of whether the public deserves an open inquiry.

This is why democracies, including Australia, separate the tasks of security and accountability. The executive governs. Parliament legislates and scrutinises. Independent bodies audit legality and propriety. Public inquiries exist precisely because there are moments—particularly after catastrophe—when internal assurance is not enough. The public may accept that some information must remain classified. What it will not accept, indefinitely, is that the agencies implicated in a failure are also the most influential voices on the process by which their performance is examined.

If there is any circumstance in which the conflict-of-interest problem becomes acute, it is an inquiry into an attack that allegedly involved a subject previously known to authorities. In such cases, the inquiry does not simply ask what the perpetrator did. It asks what the State knew, when it knew it, how it judged the risk, what it shared, and what it failed to do. It asks whether there were breakdowns in communication, classification barriers that obstructed coordination, resourcing shortfalls, or complacent assumptions embedded in threat models. Those questions reach into the domain of the agencies themselves.

That is precisely why intelligence agencies will almost always prefer a narrower review, a faster process, a lower-profile mechanism, or an inquiry that can be contained behind closed doors. The motive does not need to be cynical to be predictable. Institutional self-protection is a basic organisational constant. When the Prime Minister cites the agencies’ preference as support for his own decision, he risks turning that constant into a constitutional principle.

This is the deeper concern: process control is outcome control. The choice between a royal commission and a non-statutory review is not mere optics. It determines whether evidence can be compelled under oath, whether witnesses can be cross-examined, whether documents can be subpoenaed, whether timelines can be tested publicly, and whether contradictions can be exposed rather than managed. It also determines what the public can see, and therefore what the public can trust.

A royal commission is not a cure-all. It can take time. It can become politicised. It can uncover uncomfortable truths beyond the initial remit. But those are not defects; they are the very reasons governments sometimes avoid them. The point of a royal commission is that it is difficult to control. In the wake of a major failure, that difficulty is often the price of credibility.

Mr Albanese’s defenders will say the Prime Minister is simply acting responsibly: avoiding grandstanding, preventing extremists from gaining a platform, and protecting classified capabilities. Those are legitimate concerns, and they can be managed. Royal commissions can operate with closed sessions where needed. Sensitive evidence can be handled under strict protocols. Terms of reference can focus attention on systems rather than spectacle. None of this is novel. Australia has done it before.

What cannot be managed, if the executive chooses it, is the public’s perception that accountability has been outsourced to the very institutions whose conduct is in question. That perception is not a fringe paranoia; it is a rational inference from incentives and structure. Democracies survive not merely by claiming integrity, but by building processes that make integrity verifiable.

Leadership, in this context, means more than declaring confidence in the security state. It means setting a clear hierarchy: agencies advise on operations, while elected leaders decide on accountability, guided by independent oversight and the public interest. When the Prime Minister appears to lean on agency preference to justify avoiding a royal commission, he risks signalling the opposite—that in matters of embarrassment or institutional risk, the security apparatus has a veto on scrutiny.

This is how liberal democracies drift. Not by coup, but by deference. Not by dictatorship, but by the gradual normalisation of the idea that certain domains are too complex, too sensitive, too dangerous for open examination. Over time, “trust us” becomes a substitute for democratic control. Over time, the tail begins to wag the dog.

If Mr Albanese believes a royal commission is unnecessary, he should argue that case on democratic grounds: the existence of a truly independent oversight mechanism with equivalent coercive powers, a transparent framework for public reporting, and a clear explanation of what facts will be tested and how. He should not rest his case on the comfort of agency endorsement. That is not leadership. It is reliance.

The public does not demand theatre. It demands assurance that the inquiry process is not being designed by those who have the most to lose from its conclusions. The Prime Minister’s job is not to be dictated to by the intelligence agencies, nor to treat their institutional preferences as a proxy for the national interest. It is to lead—to ensure that security remains a function of government, not a governor of it.

By Charlie Armstrong Adams