Submitted to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, June 2026
The Bondi attack was carried out by individuals. The Holocaust was carried out by a state.
That distinction is the foundation of this submission. And it is the distinction that the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion appears, in its interim report and its apparent direction, to have missed.
What the Holocaust Actually Teaches
The Holocaust was not primarily a story of private hatred. Private antisemitism had existed in Europe for centuries without producing industrial genocide. What produced the Holocaust was something specific and institutional: the capture of state power — its law, its bureaucracy, its classification systems, its enforcement infrastructure, and the obedient compliance of ordinary officials doing their jobs — and its systematic deployment against defined categories of human beings.
Hannah Arendt documented this with precision. In The Origins of Totalitarianism she demonstrated that persecution at scale requires state machinery. In Eichmann in Jerusalem she documented what she called the “banality of evil”: Adolf Eichmann was not a fanatic or a sadist. He was an ordinary bureaucrat, competently organising train schedules, never personally confronting the human consequences of his work.
The lesson is structural. Persecution at scale requires state machinery, fragmented responsibility, distance from harm, and thoughtlessness — implementing procedures without asking whether they should be implemented at all. It does not require ideological fanaticism. It does not require bad intentions. Ordinary people, competently doing their jobs, in a system constructed to produce systematic harm, are sufficient.
Australia has recent and documented experience of exactly this pattern. The Robodebt scheme deployed automated income-averaging to generate 443,000 unlawful debt notices against welfare recipients. No individual designed it to harm people. The programmer wrote an algorithm. The data analyst applied a formula. The letter system sent notices automatically. Each said — accurately — “I just did my job.” The Robodebt Royal Commission found that legal advice warning the scheme was unlawful had been suppressed and ignored.
Fourteen months after that finding, the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Act 2026 inserted new automated classification provisions into the ASIO Act — without the oversight mechanisms the Robodebt Royal Commission specifically recommended. Parliament was warned. It passed the provisions five days later.
What the Commission Is Building
The Royal Commission was established after the Bondi attack. Antisemitism is real. The grief of the Jewish community is real. The obligation to take it seriously is genuine and pressing. This submission does not dispute any of that.
What this submission argues is that the Commission is drawing the wrong institutional lesson from the Holocaust — and that the error has consequences.
The Commission’s apparent direction is toward an enforcement-oriented architecture: mandatory IHRA adoption, funding conditionality as a sanction, campus compliance machinery, visa screening for political opinion, expanded online enforcement powers. Submission 6, lodged concurrently, documents that these five measures are without precedent in any comparable country’s antisemitism strategy. They are not international best practice. They are Australian departures from it.
There is a further consequence the Commission has not examined. When institutional machinery nominally established to protect Jewish Australians is visibly deployed to suppress political speech about Israeli state conduct — when research grants are conditioned on political compliance, when retrospective laws produce a chilling effect on Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, and Indigenous scholars — the result is not reduced antisemitism. It is resentment. That resentment is not antisemitism. It is a rational political reading of institutional behaviour. But it may produce exactly the conditions in which antisemitism grows.
What the Courts Have Already Found
The submission’s constitutional concern is not theoretical. It has already been vindicated in court.
On 16 April 2026, the NSW Court of Appeal delivered its judgment in Jarrett v State of New South Wales [2026] NSWCA 62. The Court unanimously struck down the post-Bondi Public Assembly Restriction Declaration scheme as invalid — finding that its purpose of discouraging all public assemblies irrespective of their nature was incompatible with the constitutionally prescribed system of representative government, and that its means were disproportionate.
The Commission’s interim report contains no free speech balancing language and no proportionality analysis. Seven of the 35 countries examined in Submission 6 explicitly include such analysis in their antisemitism frameworks. The Court of Appeal has now demonstrated that this omission has constitutional consequences.
Meanwhile, White Australia Party Inc v Commonwealth [2026] HCASJ 17 — decided on 4 June 2026, one week before this submission was filed — confirmed that the January 2026 antisemitism legislation raises a serious question about its consistency with the implied freedom of political communication. The Full Court will hear the constitutional challenge in September 2026. The Commission’s final report is due approximately one year after the Bondi shooting — around December 2026. This means the Commission may deliver its final recommendations while the High Court’s judgment on the constitutional validity of the legislation those recommendations build on is still pending. A Commission that finalises an enforcement architecture before the courts have determined whether that architecture is constitutionally valid has not discharged its obligation to the Crown.
The Five Asks
This submission makes five requests of the Governor-General:
One — Extend the Royal Commission by twelve months. The complexity of the subject matter, the volume of evidence placed on the public record after the Commission’s last hearing day, and the constitutional proceedings before the High Court all require adequate time. An active Royal Commission with full compulsory powers and security clearances cannot be weaponised as a completed report can. Extension protects against the worst potential expansion of state coercive power during a period of acute political pressure.
Two — Add a new term of reference directing the Commission to inquire into the nature and extent to which state power may itself become an instrument of suppression of minority communities — and to make recommendations for institutional safeguards that would protect all minority communities from such suppression.
Three — Designate the current planned report as an interim report, with a final report to be delivered twelve months later.
Four — Review and, if appropriate, re-tender the legal assistance arrangements, to address the conflict-of-interest concerns documented in the submission regarding the appointment of Gilbert + Tobin.
Five — Subject all support contracts for the extended term to open, competitive tender with full public disclosure.
On the Commissioner
The Honourable Virginia Bell AC has conducted this inquiry with dignity, rigour, and personal integrity throughout. The concern in this submission is not directed at the Commissioner. It is directed at the institutional architecture the government has constructed around her.
Commissioner Bell has been immersed in the full range of evidence, institutional pressures, advocacy, and competing perspectives that have shaped this inquiry. That immersion is not a limitation. It is an advantage. She now understands, from direct engagement, the character and dynamics of the ecosystem surrounding this Commission. She carries full security clearances and the compulsory powers that no ordinary inquiry possesses.
The extension and expanded terms of reference this submission requests are not remedies for failure. They are a recognition that Commissioner Bell is uniquely positioned — through her immersion in this process, and with the full powers of the Crown behind her — to conduct the deeper inquiry the situation requires. This submission asks the Crown to give her the mandate and the time to use what she has earned.
The Crown’s Stake
This submission is addressed not only to the Commission but directly to the Governor-General, the State Governors, and His Majesty King Charles III. The reason is constitutional.
The Crown of Australia is the body politic. It embodies the accumulated values and constitutional understandings of democratic government — the understanding that the state serves the individual, that power must justify itself, and that no government of the day owns the institutions it temporarily administers.
A Royal Commission carries the authority and the name of the Crown. Its findings and recommendations will be used — as the January 2026 laws already demonstrate — to legitimise legislative and administrative action that may significantly expand state coercive power over Australian citizens. The Crown’s reputation is directly engaged in whether that process is genuinely independent, balanced, and fair.
Where the conduct of the relevant minister is itself among the matters in question, the Crown cannot adequately exercise its independent constitutional function through the ordinary ministerial pathway. This submission asks the Crown to act directly.
The Full Submission
The complete submission — with full citations, legal references, and the five-dimension international comparison drawn from Submission 6 — is available to download here:
https://7gs.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Submission7_Final.pdf
All submissions in this series are available at 7gs.au.
The submission window for the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion closes 14 June 2026. Submissions can be made at the Commission’s website.
Holocaust memory should restrain state power, not legitimise its expansion.
Robert Vose is a Melbourne-based researcher. This is the seventh in a series of submissions to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.