We've had 26 royal commissions. Their failures should caution us against a repeat

However, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who promised accountability and transparency, has delivered too much secrecy and opacity over the past four years. Voters are seeing right through that opacity, and a cornucopia of concerned citizens have joined the call for a royal commission as a cleansing act and panacea.

Their only really valid point is that past form suggests the Albanese government would not be open about anything that would suggest even the slightest failure on its part and would use the "national security" smokescreen to its advantage.

Nor could it be trusted to implement any recommendation that might erode its voter or financial base. Examples are the ignoring of many of the recommendations of the special envoy to combat anti-Semitism Jillian Segal and those of the joint committee on gambling harm.

But before we say "Here we go again", it might be worth looking at just what we might expect of a royal commission, based on the 26 we have had since 1980.

A Bondi royal commission would include an inquiry into security and intelligence services. Well, since 1980, we have had four royal commissions into aspects of those services, and some before that. The results have not been stellar, as the events of December 14, 2025, attest.

A Bondi royal commission would inquire into anti-Semitism, but also into how vulnerable communities are discriminated against and mistreated.

Since, 1980 we have had six royal commissions on those sorts of things: aged care; deaths in custody; child sexual abuse; child detention; veterans' suicides; disability; and two into false accusations against welfare recipients.

They all fit into one or both categories of telling us what we already know or not doing much to stop future abuse of the weak and vulnerable, especially with deaths in custody.

Then we have the royal commission into financial services, established only after relentless media exposure of institutional insouciance and investigative ineptitude by the "proper authorities" which exposed grand malfeasance on the part of the banks. But after all that, the banks have gone on their merry way up to their armpits in turning a blind eye to money laundering and ripping off customers.

Even the best royal commission since 1980, that on Lindy Chamberlain, had only a short-term (albeit important) effect. It proved her innocence, but the underlying idiocy of exposing juries to junk science resulting in unjust convictions of parents remains. The Kathleen Folbigg and shaken-baby cases show that the royal commission did nothing on that score, nor the underlying propensity for police tunnel-vision about their prime suspect.

Then we have the politically inspired royal commissions (to embarrass one side of politics or the other, as a Bondi commission might well turn out to be).

Since 1980, three royal commissions into union malfeasance have not weeded out corruption and violence within unions. One found next to nothing wrong. Another (painters and dockers) ignominiously back-fired when it found massive (bottom-of-the-harbour) tax fraud within the corporate world.

The politically motivated 2014 home insulation royal commission found no systemic malfeasance.

The robodebt royal commission told us little we did not know and, despite blistering evidence and rigorous questioning by the commissioner, no-one was finally punished; public administration remains blind to advice from below, and left singed those who tried to expose illegality early.

All of these were drawn out. All were lawyers' bill-quilling exercises.

Note, there was no royal commission into the Port Arthur shooting - just effective (at least until now), forceful action by then prime minister John Howard against what everyone knew was the evil: too many people with too many guns for no legitimate reason.

In 1996, Howard's first year, he was trusted. He had not had the time to regress to the mean and tricky.

But now we have an appeal for a royal commission similar to the appeals in past centuries to the impartial, God-anointed monarch by peasants aggrieved by local authorities.

As the second verse of "God Save the King" (1745) says in praising the English monarch over foreigners and politicians: "Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks."

The "royal" element, of course, is out of place in any modern Australian quest to uncover the truth and make recommendations against future malfeasance. We have a secretive King who will not even tell us what sort of cancer he has. And we have former second in line to the throne Prince, now Mr, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.

In Australia, these inquiries should be called truth commissions or Australian commissions of inquiry.

Finally, some of those calling for a royal commission or a wider inquiry, in an ironic way, lend some credibility to the call. James Packer and the Catholic Church know a lot about the searching light of an inquiry revealing malfeasance in the case of the former and outright evil in the case of the latter. And, again, the abuse royal commission did not stop the church continuing to use its lawyers and money to continue to squeeze victims.

We will have to have the royal commission, but it will do nothing much to stem the underlying evil of anti-Semitism.

The real task now is to fix the gun laws, and constantly review them. More importantly, to ensure that opportunist politicians do not use this horror to gain populist support as they call for racist, nativist immigration policies which are unfortunately finding receptive listeners among people squeezed with housing, health, and commuting because of immigration which is much too high.

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