The timing is perfect: a book recalling the 2005 Cronulla riots by the key decision-makers at the time, New South Wales Police Minister Carl Scully and Police Commander Assistant Commissioner Mark Goodwin. The Albanese government’s decision to allow potentially pro-Hamas Palestinians to enter Australia has close parallels to the Fraser government’s appalling ‘Lebanese concession’, allowing ‘unskilled, illiterate’ Lebanese Muslims of ‘questionable character’ to seek asylum in Australia. The sons and grandsons of these people were central to the Cronulla riots.

The authors’ insights are significant and well documented. The book retells events in detail and analyses police politics, the media, and the academic framing of the events. Their conclusion is that the ‘offensive, xenophobic actions of the inebriated few’ on the 11th of December 2005 at Cronulla was not a riot. The retaliatory ‘violence and significant property damage and terrorising of suburbs’ that followed were riots, which took place in numerous Sydney suburbs, including Brighton-le-Sands, Cronulla, Maroubra and Lakemba.

The spark for the unrest was misogynistic language directed at young bikini-clad Caucasian women by young Lebanese men congregating at Cronulla Beach. There were also differences in acceptable behaviour at the beach, years in the making. Kicking footballs in others’ spaces was unacceptable to residents and visitors alike: ‘the towel versus the soccer ball’.

Lebanese Christian barrister Stephen Stanton explained, ‘there was… an arrogance in the members of the Lebanese community…. The perception as to how women were to be treated was culturally out of kilter with what was the accepted norm within the Australian community.’

By July 2006, police had laid charges against 104 people, 51 because of the original Cronulla disturbance and 53 from the retaliation riots. The latter were charged with ‘malicious damage, possession or use of a prohibited weapon, assaulting police, rioting, resisting arrest, threatening violence and affray’. In time, 200 people were charged.

The authors reveal that ‘Middle Eastern men’ were planning an attack on the ‘Northies’ Hotel at North Cronulla, including a drive-by shooting with machine guns, throwing a live hand grenade into the beer garden of the hotel from a mobile vehicle and speeding away before the blast.

Another plan was for fifty cars full of Middle Eastern men to pull up at the front of Miranda Westfield’s shopping centre. They would alight and rampage through the multi-storey shopping centre, smashing the shops and violently assaulting as many people as possible with baseball bats, iron bars, knives, guns and other weapons. This act was intended to ‘Rip the Christ out of Christmas’.

Good policing averted these and other shocking plans for violent revenge. Thousands of weapons were taken off the streets at roadblocks and in targeted searches. Weapons seized included guns, knives, home-made petrol bombs, improvised explosive devices, Molotov cocktails, metal poles, baseball bats, golf clubs, crates of bricks, rocks and lumps of concrete, wooden bats with nails protruding and shopping trolley handles.

The second most crucial part of the book is the report on the police response, triggered by Police Commissioner Moroney’s mistake of instigating an inquiry into police conduct during the events. Of course, the authors’ account has an air of self-justification, but the inquiry that ended the authors’ careers appears unjustified.

The events unfurled because CCTV footage of the Muslim revenge attacks was of night events and difficult to interpret. The video footage of the daytime events of the first Sunday were plentiful and straightforward, and arrests were made of offenders who caused the original disturbance. It appeared there was bias in policing. The Anglos were arrested for pushing around some Lebanese youths at Cronulla; arrests for the Lebanese revenge came later.

Frustrated shopkeepers released their CCTV footage to the media as if the police were unaware of it. They were aware, they had the footage and they were working on tracking offenders, but they had to be sure. The Commissioner panicked. This is an excellent account of poor leadership, venality in the media and opposition, and weakness on the part of the premier. The media acted like a pack, agreeing on the story and collectively presenting the first day of the ‘Cronulla Riots’. The ‘pack’ missed the main story, not the demonstration during the day, which turned nasty, but the violent, property-rampaging attacks in revenge.

The third aspect examines academic opinion, which predictably framed the Cronulla riots as an attack on a minority. The authors deftly take apart this well-worn and wholly inaccurate framing of events and explanation of why the ‘riots’ occurred. There was tribalism, territoriality, incivility and disrespect, but not racism or Islamophobia.

Stanton explained, ‘It’s not just a question of race or culture or otherwise, it’s regrettably a failure on the part of the family units concerned, and ultimately the monitoring of those people who were encouraged to be ethnically exclusive.’

Fortunately, the better elements of both communities won out with various initiatives. One concerned the infamous attack on the Brighton-le-Sands RSL. A youth scaled the flagpole and removed the national flag, and others joined him to spit, kick, urinate on and burn it. The youth served seven months of detention, and following an apology, the RSL sponsored him to walk the Kokoda Track.

Another positive program that Jamal Rifi and NSW Surf Life Saving initiated involved training young Lebanese men and women as lifeguards on Cronulla Beach. Established soon after the troubles, it sent a message that the communities were not at war. Three Muslim women participated in the program. One of them introduced the new burkini swimming costume, which has enabled scores of Muslim women to enjoy swimming comfortably and modestly.

The authors conclude, ‘Scholars, commentators, and the broader community have allowed reverse racism to take place by maligning a white part of Sydney but not an Arabic one.’  There are echoes of this in Albanese Labor during the Voice referendum and the Gaza visa mistake. The lesson is not to invite trouble because the cost can last for generations.