Can We Trust This Royal Commission?

Australian PM Anthony Albanese had to be dragged kicking and screaming to grudgingly allowing a royal commission into the Bondi mass-murder of Jewish Australians. Having been forced by the sheer weight of public opinion from all levels of society, Albanese is clearly doing his damnedest to sink the commission before it even starts.

There was some disquiet when Albanese announced Virginia Bell as commissioner. Bell is seen by some as simply too close to the Labor and the left. She began her career, after all, at Sydney’s Redfern Legal Centre, “dedicated to promoting social justice and human rights”. As a High Court judge, she peddled particularly egregious judicial activism.

A ruling in a suit brought by Palestine Action Group cited Ms Bell’s 2017 judgement in a case tied to protest laws in Tasmania.

Ms Bell has been criticised for a 2017 High Court decision which ruled that the Tasmanian government’s protest laws breached the implied freedoms of political communication.

Whatever your thoughts on freedom of speech, there is no doubt that the Australian Constitution has no free speech provisions. Activist judges just made it up. Yet, even they were clear that this ‘implied freedom’ could be overruled by laws. Bell clearly thinks she knows better than democratically elected MPs.

Still, Jewish Australian representatives grudgingly accepted a royal commission run by a career lefty as better than no RC at all.

They might not be so sure, now.

The daughter of the senior counsel assisting the antisemitism royal commission is a prominent pro-Palestine student activist, who led the University of Sydney’s student body in rallying against the “ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians” and called for the boycott of Israeli institutions.

Esteemed barrister Richard Lancaster last week announced he had been appointed to assist former High Court judge Virginia Bell in the royal commission called in the wake of the massacre at Bondi Beach in December.

The Australian can reveal his daughter, Lauren Lancaster, was president of the University of Sydney’s Student Representative Council from 2021–22, during which time she seconded a motion criticising Israel’s “militarist apartheid” and endorsed the “international boycott, divestment and sanctions movement”.

That would be the blatantly anti-Semitic BDS movement, founded by open anti-Semites.

Now, I can already hear the objections that ‘he’s not responsible for his daughter’s views’, which is fair enough… except that, by the left’s own argument, RC commissioners must be seen to be completely free from any taint of bias. This is, after all, the standard they demanded apply to another former High Court judge, Justice Dyson Heydon, who oversaw the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption.

Unions and left-media dredged up dirt such as that Heydon was on the panel that awarded Tony Abbott his Rhodes scholarship, over 40 years earlier. Heydon had also, on the assumption that the RC would be wrapped up by then, accepted an invitation to deliver the sixth Sir Garfield Barwick Address, a fundraising event organised by the Lawyers and the Legal Policy branches of the Liberal Party.
The left went feral, demanding Heydon step down, on account of ‘apprehended bias’.

Even assuming the Israel-hating fruit has fallen far enough from the tree, there’s still the issue of the fact that the commission will be specifically tasked with investigating the likes of his daughter.

Antisemitism on university campuses and the safety of Jewish students is expected to form a large part of Ms Bell’s probe. [USyd vice-­chancellor Mark Scott] and the powerful Group of Eight universities have announced their willingness to appear before the royal commission if invited.

The University of Sydney has repeatedly been criticised over its handling of pro-Palestine actions in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, including the two-month encampment outside the quadrangle, which was partly organised by the student council.

Daddy seems ominously woke as well.

He has chaired the NSW Bar Association Climate Change Committee since 2023, and served on its working party on the Over-Representation of Indigenous People in the NSW Criminal Justice System and Human Rights Committee.

On the other hand…

Mr Lancaster’s appointment to the royal commission was welcomed by the Jewish community and legal faculty. He has strong expertise across public, constitutional and commercial law cases in the High Court, Federal Court and NSW Supreme Court, and acted on behalf of a Jewish charitable trust in the NSW Supreme Court last year.

Well, you can’t pick your family, I guess. But does this pass the lofty test of the left’s own standards?