Part 2: The Operational Void Beneath the Sovereign Pretence

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In Part 1 we stripped the gilt off our counter-terrorism apparatus, a billion-dollar Potemkin village where sovereignty turns out to be a rental agreement with Uncle Sam. Now the operational question: how did two blokes with a bag of long guns and two handmade ISIS flags slip through a security net woven from satellites, phone taps, and Five Eyes intelligence sharing?

Busted? For all his swagger about “keeping Australians safe”, our national security head and tail again fails the most basic test of any lookout. How long before “doing an ASIO” enters the language, alongside “flash as a rat with a gold tooth”, “useless as tits on a bull” and “more front than Myers”?

The Bondi Beach massacre of Sunday evening, 14 December 2025 exposes what Crikey Political Editor, Bernard Keane well describes as the “horrific fragility” of Australia’s intelligence and policing frameworks. Also on show: how our spymasters, corporate contractors, Ministers, spivs and national bouncers avoid any reckoning with the systems they help build.

Bondi also reveals our own home-grown demagogues, NRA fans and celebrity-populists who pop up on camera on cue at Bondi. A nation’s grief is mediated through this freak show.

“We love you, Pauline”, a voice calls from the crowd as the One Nation Leader lays a wreath. Heir apparent, a bare-headed Barnaby is there, too, hat on heart, a model of respect. In pressers, however, our right-wing fringe is quick to cut up ugly; weaponise grief, scapegoat Muslims and immigrants, stoke racism, 1950s bigotry, nostalgia and fear of the other.

Who let them in? PHON demands. Of course, there is no single villain. Or cause. What emerges is not a single oversight, a weak link or a clapped-out metal detector, but a recurring pattern of procedural closure where intervention was required. A Rolls-Royce is never said to break down: it simply fails to proceed. As did ASIO. File closed. Passports stamped. Triggers pulled.

The Perpetrators: Known, Examined, Cleared

Hannah Arendt knew evil is banal. Sajid Akram, 50, an Indian national from Hyderabad who arrived in Australia in 1998 and later became a permanent resident, operated a fruit and vegetable business in Sydney’s west. He held a valid NSW Category A/B firearms licence from 2015 and was legally in possession of six long guns, some of which were used in the attack.

His son, Naveed Akram, 24, is Australian-born. In 2019, ASIO examined him for his links with a Sydney-based Islamic State network, including links to individuals already on the agency’s radar. The investigation ran for six months before he was assessed as presenting “no indication of any ongoing threat or threat of him engaging in violence”, a conclusion later confirmed publicly by Prime Minister Albanese. His mother describes Naveed as the perfect child.

The file was closed. The associations were noted, documented, archived, and, on the available public record, not revisited.

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The Philippines Connection: Warning Signs Unjoined

In November 2025, both Sajid and Naveed Akram travel to the southern Philippines, arriving on November 1 and departing on November 28. Sajid travels on his Indian passport; Naveed on his Australian passport. Immigration records list Davao as their final destination, a region long associated with Islamist militancy and past Islamic State-linked activity.

Australian counter-terrorism officials say that the pair are believed to have undergone some form of militant or weapons training during this trip. What training they received, whom they met, and what capabilities they acquired are now the subject of investigation; after the fact.

The travel itself was not secret. Philippine immigration authorities confirmed the dates. Australian agencies had access to this information via Five Eyes. A man examined for ISIS associations travels to a known militant region, accompanied by a licensed firearms owner with multiple weapons at home. Let’s not pretend that one of the over 2000 operatives didn’t twig.

No publicly acknowledged preventive intervention occurred. No alert was raised. No connection was made between a closed ASIO file, foreign travel to a high-risk region, and a legally held arsenal in suburban Sydney. The Joint Counter-Terrorism Team; linking ASIO, the AFP and NSW Police, either did not act on this convergence of risk, or was structurally incapable of doing so.

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The Attack: Systems Present, Protection Absent

At 6.45pm on 14 December 2025, the Akrams open fire from a pedestrian overpass overlooking Bondi Beach during a publicly advertised Hanukkah celebration attended by a thousand people.

The attack lasts several minutes. Fifteen people are killed. Dozens more are injured. Early reports indicate more than forty taken to hospital, including police and children. Among the dead are a ten-year-old girl, a rabbi, a Holocaust survivor and a visiting French national.

Islamic State material, including improvised flags, is recovered from the attackers’ vehicle. Investigators also locate home-made bombs, aka improvised explosive devices. Video footage verified by international media shows Naveed Akram firing a bolt-action rifle expertly.

Sajid Akram is shot dead by police at the scene. His son, Naveed survives and is taken into custody. Subsequent raids on the family home in Bonnyrigg and on short-term accommodation in Campsie yield further evidence. By then, fifteen people are already dead.

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What ASIO Actually Does: Surveillance Without Prevention

ASIO’s budgeted total expenses for 2024–25 are approximately $729 million, with departmental appropriation of around $594 million. The organisation employs more than 2,000 staff, though its precise headcount is now classified on national security grounds. Its statutory powers reach deeply into Australians’ communications, associations and private lives.

Yet when the test came, when a previously examined subject with documented extremist associations travelled to a militant region and returned to a home containing multiple firearms, the system produced no preventive action visible to the public. This does not suggest a lack of data. It suggests a systemic failure to convert information into lawful, timely intervention.

As Bernard Keane observes, what Bondi revealed was not a one-off lapse but structural fragility. The apparatus appears formidable on paper, expansive in power, but brittle at the point where intelligence must translate into protection. Keane stops short of calling our spooks a hoax.

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The Myth of Spy Supremacy

What if the apparatus isn’t broken, but built this way?

Decades of spy mythology; post-9/11 promises of omniscient shields, now crack publicly. Bondi is no anomaly; it’s an autopsy of a hoax. For twenty years, agencies like ASIO claimed thousands of disruptions amid ballooning budgets, yet high-profile attacks recur: Bali 2002 (ignored chatter), Sydney siege 2014, Melbourne stabbings 2018.

Scholars document this pattern. Intelligence failures stem not from missing data, but “failures of imagination”; warnings dismissed as politically inconvenient, as in pre-9/11 U.S. reports or UK’s 7/7 London bombings.

Loch K. Johnson charts trillions spent post-9/11 yielding few verifiable stops, mostly reactive busts of known networks, not predictive interdiction of lone actors like the Akrams.

ASIO tracks 400+ “subjects of concern” yearly, yet prevention metrics stay classified and self-referential; faith-based security where unverifiable “successes” excuse flops. Critical terrorism studies reveal the real output: budgets sustained, surveillance expanded, communities policed. Effective against dissent, useless against ideologues with legal guns.

The war on terror birthed a theatre: agencies perform diligence to justify powers, leaving demagogues like Pauline Hanson to fill the void with xenophobia. If spies worked, radicalisation wouldn’t fester unchecked. We read that there are hundreds like the Akrams on ASIO’s books.

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The Political Response: Ritual and Deflection

Within hours of the massacre, the PM promises reviews (of course) and assurances that “systems would be examined”. The Home Affairs Minister pledges further inquiries. (Of course.)

None of these processes can produce public accountability proportionate to the failure.

Former PM, “stop the boats” sloganeer and self-appointed terror expert, Tony Abbott and opposition figures, demand answers while omitting their role in constructing this architecture; bipartisan expansions post-9/11 without safety gains. The pattern is well-worn: tragedy, inquiry, muted reform, expanded budgets, diminished memory. Robodebt showed us how it goes.

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Fifteen People Deserved Better

Fifteen people went to Bondi Beach that December evening to celebrate Hanukkah. They deserved the protection of a functioning state. What they encountered was an intelligence system proficient at collection, adept at performance, and pathetically inadequate when tested.

If sovereignty is the capacity to protect one’s citizens, and competence is the ability to act on available intelligence, then Bondi exposes the erosion of both. As for the spies themselves or the other links in the chain, “crickets”. We have yet to see anyone take responsibility.

The mission, as currently structured, appears less concerned with prevention than institutional survival: budgets, bureaucracies, careers; powers expanded; diligence performed after the fact. Protection remains the promise. It was not the outcome when it mattered.

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Coda: Demand the Audit

They will promise an inquiry. They will promise a review. They will promise lessons.

But Australians do not live inside a promise. They live inside a country.

Demand public audits of “foiled plots” metrics. Reallocate spy trillions to unglamorous prevention: community ties, accountable policing, deradicalisation that works.

If the state can watch, record and archive, yet cannot prevent, then the question is not whether it needs more powers. The question is why it deserves the ones it already has.

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Editor’s note: This article is based on publicly reported information available at the time of writing; where investigations remain ongoing, the analysis distinguishes between established facts, official statements and reasoned inference. References to intelligence scholarship drawn from works such as Philip H.J. Davies on analytic failures and Loch K. Johnson’s critiques of post-9/11 efficacy.