‘It’s terror, but is it terrorism?’ wondered NSW Police Force Counter Terrorism and Special Tactics Commander Assistant Commissioner Mark Walton in an interview last week with Sky News host Sharri Markson. Walton was pondering the increasingly violent antisemitic attacks being launched on Australian Jews, anyone thought to be Jewish, or anyone in their vicinity.

One might have hoped that defining terrorism wasn’t so difficult for a Counter Terrorism and Special Tactics Commander, a fortiori when the events Walton was reflecting on included the firebombing and defacing with antisemitic graffiti of a childcare centre located near a synagogue in Sydney and stuffing enough explosives into a caravan to create a blast 40 metres in diameter.

Just in case Walton and his team weren’t sure of the target, the caravan-cum-improvised-explosive-device included ‘antisemitic content’ and the addresses of Sydney’s Great Synagogue on Elizabeth Street and the Sydney Jewish Museum in Darlinghurst.

One would have hoped that even for Walton it should have been clear that what he was dealing with was not just terror but terrorism. Australian law is clear-cut on the matter. The Criminal Code Act 1995 defines a ‘terrorist act’ as an action, or the threat of an action, that causes serious harm to individuals, results in death; endangers a person’s life (excluding the perpetrator’s); creates a serious risk to public health or safety; causes serious damage to property; seriously interferes with, disrupts, or destroys critical infrastructure; and is committed with the intention of advancing a political, religious, or ideological cause; and coercing or intimidating the government or the public, or a section of the public.

If the NSW police were not sure what they were dealing with, the December 2024 firebombing of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne could have given them a clue since it was declared a terrorist act.

Yet to date, the NSW police have not officially designated the caravan bomb (or anything else that has occurred in NSW) as an attempted terrorist attack because the Joint Counter Terrorism Team is still trying to figure out the intent behind the explosive vehicle.

If all this seems criminally obtuse, recall that this is the police force that turned up at the Sydney Opera House on 9 October 2023 and made no arrests while a mob, with no authorisation to gather in that place, waved the flags of the terrorist organisation Hezbollah, launched flares and chanted ‘F–k the Jews’, ‘Gas the Jews’ and ‘Where’s the Jews’.

The mob clearly broke the law in relation to gathering without a permit and launching flares but all Walton would say of that night to Markson was, ‘I’m not a Monday night quarterback second guessing all the pressures that the police were under at short notice to respond to what was clearly a very volatile event’.

As for the chants, as far as Walton was concerned, ‘One word can be interpreted in many ways depending on the context’.

And as to whether antisemitism had been normalised or the laws needed to be strengthened, Walton simply said, ‘I’m an old cop, I’ll leave that to the politicians.’

Walton has a point. Who can blame the police for being paralysed by confusion when the mixed message repeatedly sent by the Prime Minister and the federal government was that any discussion of antisemitism was to be framed by a warning not to engage in ‘Islamophobia’?

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the police were wary of making any arrests because they did not want to be accused by the government, or publicly-funded Muslim organisations, of ‘Islamophobia’.

Were they also more concerned with their own safety in choosing to arrest law-abiding Australian Jews rather than law-breaking Australian Muslims?

Who can blame the police for not being able to discern antisemitism and hate speech when the government, the national broadcaster, leaders in the Muslim community, and academics relentlessly retail lies about Israel and/or demonise Jews, and at the same time treat terrorist organisations such as Hamas and Hezbollah as if they were a morally justified resistance fighting on behalf of oppressed Palestinians against an evil, genocidal, apartheid state led by a possible war criminal, rather than blood-soaked genocidal, homophobic terrorists who want to destroy Israel and replace it with a 7th-century caliphate?

With all this as a backdrop, as far as we can tell nobody bothered to brief the Prime Minister that a jumbo-sized improvised explosive device had been discovered and if detonated would have been the worst domestic act of terror in Australia’s history.

Yet, as Jason Bassi, the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and a former adviser on national security to then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull put it, ‘Terrorism and politically-motivated violence is a special category in our law because it is an attack on the whole nation’ adding, ‘If these threats are not discussed at the national cabinet, then what should be discussed at national cabinet?’

Climate change, presumably. Recall that shortly after Labor was elected, in July 2022, Prime Minister Albanese appointed Chris Bowen, the Minister for Climate Change and Energy, a member of the National Security Committee (NSC) of the cabinet, reflecting Albanese’s belief that climate change was a significant factor in national security considerations.

Then, in January 2023, Albanese removed the permanent membership status of the NSC of Asio Director-General Mike Burgess and Director-General of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, Kerri Hartland. Henceforth, they would be consulted on a case-by-case basis. Eventually, 18 months later, the Asio director rejoined the NSC as a permanent member but not, as far as we know, the head of Asis.

The judgment of Asio and other security agencies is that the national terrorism threat level at the moment is ‘probable’, indicating there is a greater than fifty per cent chance of an onshore attack or attack planning in the next twelve months.

This seems something of an understatement given that we know with something close to 100 per cent certainty that an attack had been planned and those involved have not, as far as we know, been identified, let alone arrested.

As for the police, those who are meant to protect us from a terrorist attack, apparently 7,000 jobs out of 65,000 are vacant nationally, including more than 2,000 in New South Wales. This, we have been told by the Police Federation of Australia, is a ‘powder keg … about to explode’. Or to use a metaphor more suited to our predicament, a caravan stuffed with explosives.