Comment

Chris Wallace
What the royal commission says about Albanese’s character

An extraordinary opening week in Australian politics in 2026 has seen a full-court press of business, sporting, security and political figures force Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to embrace a federal royal commission into the Bondi terror attack.

Albanese began to publicly walk back his opposition to a federal royal commission on Tuesday, after resisting for nearly a month. On Thursday he established one, led by former High Court justice Virginia Bell, to report by December 14, 2026.

“Albo’s going to have to call a royal commission so he might as well do it right away,” one senior Labor figure said privately after the attack.

“He’s going to have to wear the odium of not reading the room,” the same source added this week when the prime minister finally abandoned what proved an untenable position. “The royal commission is about people getting their say. They want to be heard. Now they will.”

The month-long delay created space for a massive political operation to build in public and private.

Its size and effectiveness, especially given it was achieved during Australia’s traditionally sybaritic summer break, has gobsmacked hardened political operatives in Canberra.

While the energy was directed at achieving the eminently reasonable goal of a Commonwealth royal commission, subtle elements were also evident raising the national temperature in a counterproductive way.

Retired general Peter Cosgrove has every right as a citizen, for example, to call for a federal royal commission.

Introduced repeatedly as a former governor-general in the media when he does so, however, subtly undermines important distinctions about where responsibility lies in Australia’s system of government.

Governor-General Sam Mostyn has faced trenchant calls to sack Albanese, yelled by members of the public from early on after the December 14 Bondi attack and amplified since in a social media onslaught against her – this, just two months after the 50th anniversary of the Dismissal.

It was a noxious element given the apolitical role of the office, which she has repeatedly emphasised while supporting the Jewish community and the wider Australian public following the attack.

Open letters signed by significant numbers of people from respected segments of society were orchestrated over the past several days, piling pressure on a recalcitrant prime minister.

As one senior government figure observed: “Once the sports stars came out it was game over.”

Behind the scenes, Labor people tried to counsel and nudge Albanese to correct his royal commission misstep. Overweening confidence in his initial political judgement, however, his keynote stubbornness and his entrenched reluctance to listen amplified the agony.

What could have been quickly corrected was, in line with a now unmissable pattern in Albanese’s behaviour, unnecessarily dragged out.

That pattern is one of poor judgement and denial, followed by damaging delay, culminating in capitulation.

It was the same pattern evident in the federal parliamentary allowances scandal in late 2025.

It took Albanese 20 days of denial and delay after the controversy began before he capitulated to the inevitable on December 23, announcing the rules around allowances would be tightened.

It was evident, too, in Albanese’s indulgence of his friend and confidant Andrew Giles’s tepid handling of the NZYQ High Court ruling’s consequences for seven months before dumping him as immigration minister in 2024.

Delaying the politically popular rejigging of the Morrison government’s regressive stage three tax cuts until midway through his government’s first term is another example. The prime minister clung to his “my word is my bond” mantra long after changed economic circumstances made his 2022 election promise not to alter them redundant.

Common to all these examples is needless political damage arising from Albanese overestimating his political judgement and being closed to alternative viewpoints and advice.

Most of the prime minister’s denials and delays never see the light of day. They’re loyally kept out of the media by colleagues frustrated by his unwillingness to listen to good arguments for better political positions and bolder and more robust policies.

The difference this time is the klieg light level of exposure thrown onto him and other significant political figures following the Bondi attack, framing adverse comparisons.

Governor-General Mostyn and New South Wales Premier Chris Minns set the pace from the start, and Albanese appeared to somewhat awkwardly tag along.

Mostyn was out of the blocks early and effectively, hitting the right calm, supportive tone and focusing on healing and unity in line with the approach of the governors-general who are her touchstones: Zelman Cowen and William Deane.

Minns, briefly a firefighter earlier in life, channelled first-responder energy and recalled parliament, announced a state royal commission and passed new gun laws.

In contrast with his usual ease at sporting events and celebrity shindigs, Albanese looked uncomfortable and inadequate in the face of national tragedy.

The plodding, controlling ways that served him well enough to become prime minister in the first place, and win re-election in a landslide last year, suddenly quit working for him. Albanese was stunned, appeared personally hurt and was slow to work his way out of his funk. He managed to make every picture a loser.

Compare and contrast the images of Mostyn’s and Minns’s individual visits to Bondi hero Ahmed Al Ahmed in hospital – friendly, relaxed, seated – with that of Albanese standing over his bedside.

Albanese “cut a lonely political figure”, as press gallery doyenne Michelle Grattan put it, laying a small bunch of flowers at Bondi Pavilion the morning after the attack, with only police for company. Mostyn visited later and was pictured with numerous community members.

Now, finally, Albanese has yielded to wiser advice, in the same way he has been politically saved from himself repeatedly in previous episodes of poor judgement and performance. He moved this week to draw the line under, and fight back from, his mishandling of the Bondi attack aftermath.

A federal royal commission has been established. The Richardson review into Australia’s federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies has been rolled into it, with an April interim report deadline.

Parliament is likely to meet a fortnight earlier than planned to deal with legislation arising from the attack, which he appropriately set in train in its wake.

The government is not without its own arguments as it tries to wrest back the initiative during this period.

The Coalition has walked both sides of the street on free speech and hate speech, and those contradictions need to be reconciled.

In 2014, then Abbott government attorney-general George Brandis famously asserted the right to be a bigot in relation to Coalition friend Andrew Bolt’s egregious 2011 comments about Indigenous Australians. It has set the tone for the Coalition parties’ stance since.

The Dutton opposition voted against the anti-doxxing laws Labor’s then attorney-general Mark Dreyfus brought to parliament in 2024, for example. Coalition frontbencher Julian Leeser’s claim that Labor should have moved against doxxing faster is farcical against this backdrop.

Is the opposition going to abandon the Brandis bigotry doctrine? If so, let’s hear them acknowledge the stance and explicitly announce its disavowal.

This is a job for the parliament, not just the government. Crossbenchers should play their part, too, in getting the Coalition to own its role in heightening division in Australian society over the past three decades.

There is more sorrow than anger inside Labor over Albanese’s wrong-footedness on Bondi. The common view is that he is “just a very poor advocate for his position”.

Twinned with this is despair over what opposing the royal commission, and opposing it for so long, says about Albanese’s emotional intelligence, especially when one was so deeply desired from the outset by those most affected by the attack.

The prime minister has enforced a compliant cabinet and caucus culture in which people are discouraged from speaking up. Those who step out of line are punished and excluded.

Governments that don’t welcome healthy internal discussion are usually resistant to outside messages, too.

This stops the government’s immune system from quickly registering and acting on important messages that could help it perform better.

Switching to an inclusive rather than controlling approach to government could help Albanese overcome his entrenched pattern of denial, delay and eventual capitulation to what is politically obvious from the start to everyone but him.

Over the course of 2026 it may become more a matter of necessity than choice, as cabinet and caucus join the dots on this pattern.

Labor MPs are not unsympathetic to Albanese’s latest example of political cluelessness, but they’re also tiring of having to explain it to party members and constituents.

The government may have won last year’s election in a landslide, but that landslide was based on a primary vote of just 34.56 per cent.

The political forces that have gathered and brought a federal royal commission into being, against the prime minister’s will, are “bigger than Albo”, as one Labor operative put it. The prime minister is going to have to lift his game.

Overcoming the horror of the Bondi attack is going to require significant efforts to make Australia truly inclusive again. Inclusion begins at home, including inside the government.

Paul Bongiorno is on leave.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 9, 2026 as "‘Bigger than Albo’".

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