Scars of alleged Invasion Day terror attack run deep six months on

The scars left by what police described as a potential "mass-casualty event" which threatened to devastate the crowd of Perth's Invasion Day rally still run deep, even nearly six months later.

That much was clear from a day of evidence reflecting on racism, hate and violence directed towards Aboriginal people given earlier this week.

Liam Alexander Hall, 32, has been charged with throwing an improvised explosive device into the crowd and is yet to enter a plea.

Police allege he was motivated by a "hateful, racist ideology" — a determination which contributed to a federal parliamentary inquiry being stood up.

The committee's chair, Jana Stewart, said she had felt the "real sense of distress" from those who gave evidence.

"It is very much still a lived feeling of fear from people here," she said.

As that probe heard evidence a few hundred metres from where the attack happened, a Royal Commission on the other side of the country was investigating the antisemitism which led to 15 people being killed while celebrating the Jewish festival of Hanukkah on Bondi Beach in December.

Despite the vastly different outcomes of the two incidents, the inquiry highlighted some of the key similarities between the two attacks on Australian minorities.

'We should be dead'

Renae Isaacs-Guthridge told the inquiry the alleged bomb landed at the feet of her, her daughter and her daughter's friends.

The Noongar and Yamatji academic voiced her frustration at being "pretty much ignored" when they tried to raise the alarm with police, and what they saw as a similarly slow response from political leaders in the days that followed.

"I think had the Bondi attack not occurred, it wouldn't have been so obvious to me," she said.

"And I understand no one died, I get that. But by all intents I shouldn't be sitting here talking to you today.

"I, and my girls and mum and sister, we should be dead because it landed right in front of us.

Social media hate

In its first block of hearings, the royal commission heard antisemitism had become normalised in Australia in the lead up to the attack, and that it felt like little was being done about it.

The rampant spread of racist content on social media was another common thread.

It was a theme echoed in the Perth hearings.

"Despite the hundreds of comments I delete and the accounts that I block, I often refresh the page and I am flooded with comments that tell us that Aboriginal people deserve to die, that racial discrimination is justified," Leanne Djilandi Dolby from the National Indigenous Times told the inquiry.

The Times' managing director Reece Harley said social media companies did not do enough to protect people from the abuse.

"The platforms, in our view, make this worse. Their reporting mechanisms are slow and there is no meaningful engagement with major media organisations like ours," the Times' managing director, Reece Harley, said.

"The burden of protection, therefore, lands on us: a small Aboriginal owned company and on Aboriginal staff like Leanne while tech giants profit from the engagement that this hatred generates."

The Bondi Royal Commission examined similar issues, with one witness describing a "cesspool of Jew hatred" online.

Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads — downplayed controversial changes to its moderation which made it much more reactive.

YouTube was unmoving in its belief that a video which suggested a victim of the terror attack lied about his injuries did not violate hate speech policies, while X came under fire for refusing to engage with the probe.

Former minister fronts inquiry

Many witnesses at the inquiry were firm in their view that the government needed to do more — including, but not limited to, better regulating social media.

Former Indigenous Australians minister Ken Wyatt, having seen from the inside what can stop governments from doing more, said he hoped the dual inquiries would offer a turning point.

"I suspect that [following] the Royal Commission into antisemitism, that there will be money allocated [to implementing its recommendations]," he told the inquiry.

"What I'd like to see, if that occurs then, is for the Indigenous parallel to be equally funded and supported so it is rolled out across the nation and that we as a country move forward in accepting that difference is not an issue, that all of us have something to contribute in different ways.

"And that Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander culture is as equally as important as white Anglo-Saxon culture, Australian culture, and the culture of every other nation that resides in multicultural Australia."

'Justice over complacency'

The ultimate aim of both inquiries is the same: the avoid further harm to members of marginalised cultures.

"Australia does not suffer from a shortage of evidence about racism. Australia suffers from a shortage of implementation," Wyatt said.

"The challenge before this committee is to no longer discover the evidence. The challenge is convincing government to implement the report."

It was a test of the government choosing "implementation over rhetoric, accountability over aspiration and justice over complacency", he said.

That test has been failed many times before. It will be up to state and federal governments to decide if this time will be different.