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The Labor government are desperately resisting growing calls for a royal commission into the Bondi massacre. It’s almost like they’ve got something to hide.
Such as: how did two known jihadis, one of whom had been flagged by ASIO for years, legally acquire six rifles? Why were virulently anti-Semitic and violently jihadist Muslim groups allowed to openly proselytise? Indeed, why did the government grant nearly $30 million to openly anti-Semitic jihadist preachers? Why was ASIO’s budget and staffing cut at a time when Australia was facing the most obvious terror threat in decades?
And how were intelligence agencies apparently completely unable to notice what even legacy media journalists were able to turn up in just a couple of days?
Spending by Bondi shooters Sajid Akram and Naveed Akram in a Philippines terror hotspot should have been flagged by Australia’s financial monitoring system, industry sources say, with experts questioning how the men avoided raising the suspicion of intelligence agencies despite weeks on the ground.
This gives the lie to excuses peddled by some that the pair didn’t spend long enough in the known jihadist training ground to mean anything. In fact, they were there for a month. Not only that, a simple tracking of their credit card spending shows that they travelled into areas long held by Islamic militants.
Money laundering industry sources have questioned how Naveed and Sajid Akram were not flagged for their spending in Mindanao, with large parts of the island covered by Australia’s harshest security warnings, cautioning travellers to avoid them due to terror and kidnapping risks.
Australia’s money laundering controls are supposed to detect suspicious spending, flagging the transactions before they are escalated to regulator Austrac.
Austrac can then refer those reports to other intelligence agencies, likely ASIO or ASUS. It also flags transactions which may be tied to sex trafficking or sex abuse. Industry sources questioned if banks flagged transactions by Naveed and Sajid Akram or whether Austrac investigated them.
In fact, as unrelated child sex-abuse charges show, Australia has agents on the ground in the area.
So, what were the murderous Muslims up to?
They were believed to have received military training from ISEA groups, with investigations now centring on how they made contact with the group in the Philippines.
Questions are also being raised about whether the father and son were trained in bomb-making, with two unexploded devices found at the scene and another in their car.
But, as we already know, the sheer numbers of jihadist Muslims is swamping terror agencies’ abilities to monitor them all. A situation worsened by decades of mass immigration that has flooded even more of them in. Not to mention a Labor dementedly determined to welcome the worst in the world to Australia, from ISIS brides to Palestinians.
At the same time, cutting terror agencies’ budgets and staffing. ‘Austerity’ measures effectively slashed $100 million from ASIO’s budget. Worse, millions more was spent on redundancies, as dozens of senior agents were forced out of Australia’s national security agency.
[The Australian] can reveal a taxpayer-funded exodus of ASIO senior staff – many of whom were veterans of the 9/11 Islamist terrorism national security era – who were ushered out the door just months after the new spy chief Mike Burgess took the reins.
The ASIO departures are known by some Canberra insiders as the “Red Wedding”, a reference to one of the bloodiest scenes in HBO’s series Game of Thrones.
This comes as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confirmed ASIO began investigating one of the two Bondi shooters, Naveed Akram, in October 2019 – a month after Mr Burgess was appointed – for six months.
The conclusion of that investigation happens to coincide with the lead-up to the mass departures, but ASIO says the redundancies had no “operational impact”.
Jewish Australians might beg to differ.
About 10 senior staff had their employment with the agency terminated on a single day, this masthead understands.
Sure, this was before Albanese was elected, but he did nothing to reverse such a deplorable situation. In fact, his finance minister’s cuts to the ASIO budget only made it worse. In tandem with his government’s steadfast refusal to tackle rising Islamic extremism in a craven bid to not lose the critical votes of Muslim Western Sydney, the result was inevitable.
