This Old Commission, He Played One: A Nursery Rhyme in Verses for an Inquiry That Keeps Rolling Home

Let us begin where we must. On 14 December 2025, fifteen people were murdered at Bondi Beach during a Hanukkah celebration. The attack was ISIS-inspired, carried out by gunmen whose vehicle was found to contain explosive devices. Of the fifteen dead gathered in a public space to celebrate a festival of light, thirteen were Jewish Australians. This was not ambiguous. This was not contested. This was a massacre, and the grief and fear it produced in the Jewish community is real, documented, and deserving of the most serious national response.

What follows is not an argument that antisemitism is overblown, or that Jewish Australians do not have cause for alarm. They do. A Holocaust survivor testified about his reluctance to wear Jewish symbols in public. A teenage girl described being too scared to wear Jewish jewellery. A school had been graffitied with text branding Jews as “terrorists” and “dogs.” A woman who survived Hungary’s persecutions told the Commission that after sixty-six years in Australia, she now felt, for the first time since childhood, that she needed to hide again. These testimonies are not theatre. They are not confected. They are what happens when hatred metastasises into normalcy.

But a royal commission is also a political instrument, and the machinery around this one invites scrutiny that has nothing to do with antisemitism and everything to do with how Australia conducts public reckoning. The Commission has been built in ways that are likely to compromise the very work it was established to do, and the remedy is not to abandon the inquiry, but to be honest about what would have made it stronger.

This old man, he played one. He played knick-knack on my thumb.

One: The Interim Report That Reported Before Anyone Had Spoken

Scott Prasser, a public policy researcher and expert on royal commissions, has observed that interim reports are usually produced halfway through a commission – after hearings, after evidence, after something resembling due process. This interim report arrived on 30 April 2026, before a single public witness had been called. In Senate Estimates, the 14 December 2026 reporting deadline – timed to the first anniversary of the massacre – had already been described as “quite an aggressive reporting date.” A timeline calibrated to a symbolic calendar rather than to the pace of evidence is not a timeline designed to go wherever the evidence leads. An inquiry that prejudges its schedule will find that the schedule prejudges its conclusions. The old man was already rolling home before he had left the house.

This old man, he played two. He played knick-knack on my shoe.

Two: The Definition That Does Too Much Work

Commissioner Bell adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism as the Commission’s working frame, noting that arguments against the definition often overlook the requirement to consider overall context before making any determination. That qualification is real and should be taken seriously.

The difficulty is not the IHRA’s core definition, which is unobjectionable: antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. The difficulty lies in the eleven accompanying examples, seven of which concern Israel. One states that it is antisemitic to claim that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour. Consider what this does analytically. It places a substantive political proposition – that a particular state’s founding ideology is or is not racist – inside the definitional perimeter of a form of hatred. A South African who argued in 1985 that apartheid South Africa was a racist endeavour was making a contested political claim; whether one agreed or disagreed, the claim was not itself a category of bigotry. The IHRA example asks Australians to treat an analogous claim about Israel differently, not because the claim is necessarily false, but because the category it occupies has been redrawn.

This is the substantive problem, and it is why even the definition’s principal author has expressed alarm. Kenneth Stern wrote the definition in 2010 for the American Jewish Committee as an educational tool; by the mid-2010s he was publicly warning that it was being weaponised to suppress campus criticism of Israel, a use he described as a betrayal of its purpose – a remarkable thing for a self-described Zionist to have to say about his own work. It is why Dennis Altman, a Jewish Australian intellectual whose sympathy for the Commission’s purposes is not in doubt, has noted the asymmetry by which the characterisation of Israel as racist is treated differently from similar characterisations of other states. Commissioner Bell is a brilliant jurist. She has been handed a definitional instrument that would give even a less brilliant jurist trouble, and she has adopted it whole rather than drawing the line where it needed to be drawn: at the core definition, with the contested examples held at arm’s length for case-by-case contextual analysis. That choice has consequences for the authority of everything that follows.

This old man, he played three. He played knick-knack on my knee.

Three: The Arena and the Inquiry

A Sydney councillor with a long record of anti-Zionist activism urged supporters of the pro-Palestinian movement to “flood” the Commission with submissions and “bring balance.” The Jewish community did not receive this warmly. Nor should they have. A commission established in the wake of a massacre is not a Twitter poll. “Balance” is not a value-neutral concept when one side of the ledger begins with fifteen bodies on a beach.

But the episode illustrates what has happened to the inquiry’s social meaning. It has become, for many parties, less a solemn national fact-finding exercise and more an arena in which competing communities fight for recognition and the framing of public memory. This is not entirely the Commission’s fault. It is, in part, a consequence of the definitional choice described above: when a definition makes Israel a constitutive subject of the inquiry, the inquiry will attract every Australian with a view on Israel, and the centre of gravity will shift away from the question of what it is actually like to be a Jewish Australian in 2026. The Middle East was always going to be in the room. The definitional framework guaranteed that it would never leave.

This old man, he played four. He played knick-knack on my door.

Four: What Antisemitism Actually Looks Like Now

On the first day of public hearings, a man was arrested outside the building housing the Royal Commission for wearing a t-shirt displaying a swastika and antisemitic messages. The country we are investigating is the country we are standing in.

A Jewish school president described security measures that had made her school feel more like a prison than a place of learning. Jewish Care Victoria told the Commissioner that the retirement home had invested $1.8 million in security measures and guards following the post-October 7 surge in antisemitism. One witness described wearing his kippah under a baseball cap. A Year 10 student, speaking under a pseudonym, described classmates performing Nazi salutes towards her during a class studying The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

Set aside, for a moment, the structural debates and definitional wrestling. Here is a child, studying a novel about the Holocaust, being subjected to Nazi salutes by her classmates, in an Australian school in 2025. If there is a single image that captures the simultaneous failure of Australian education, parenting and civic culture, it is this one. The Commission did not create that classroom. But it is, at least, looking at it. And whatever one thinks of its framework, the existence of that classroom is the only justification the inquiry needs.

This old man, he played five. He played knick-knack on my hive.

Five: The Question of Outcome

The government has allocated $131.1 million from 2025–26 to support the establishment and operation of this Commission. One hundred and thirty-one million dollars is a serious sum. It is, among other things, enough to fund a very thorough record of what was already known. Several Jewish Australians who gave evidence during the first hearing block voiced doubt that the Commission would translate its findings into meaningful change. This is not cynicism. It is experience. Australia has held royal commissions into Aboriginal deaths in custody, aged care, institutional child sexual abuse, Robodebt, and the banking sector. The shelves of Parliament House groan with recommendations that were accepted in principle and implemented in practice almost not at all.

A royal commission is not an instrument of change. It is an instrument of attention. It compels a country to look at something for a defined period and to produce a public record of what it has been seen. The honest case for this Commission is that the public record it creates will be indispensable to those who must, after the report is filed and the cameras have moved on, keep fighting for the recommendations it contains. That is not a small thing. But it is a different thing from what was promised.

This old man, he played six. He played knick-knack on my sticks.

Six: Timing and Trust

The ECAJ has noted that there are conspiracy theories claiming the government or the Jewish community are running the Royal Commission and have pre-determined its outcome, and has emphasised that the Commission runs independently. I do not believe the Commission is being run to a predetermined outcome. I do believe that the way it has been structured makes that suspicion harder to refute than it should be.

An inquiry announced by a Labor government – with bipartisan support – some three weeks after the attack, whose interim report was delivered before public hearings began, whose definitional framework was selected in advance, and whose final report is due on the massacre’s first anniversary: each of those choices is individually defensible. Together they form a pattern that erodes the public-trust dividend a royal commission is supposed to generate. A better-designed inquiry would have decoupled its reporting from the symbolic calendar, held its interim report until after evidence had been heard, and adopted the IHRA core definition while explicitly reserving its most contested examples for contextual analysis rather than structural assumption. None of those adjustments would have diminished the seriousness of the inquiry. All of them would have strengthened the authority of its conclusions. Credibility, like trust, is not declared. It is built into the design.

This old man, he played seven. He played knick-knack up to heaven.

Seven: Rolling Home

The Commission will produce its report. It will contain recommendations. The Commission is neither the problem nor the solution. But it is not merely a mirror – mirrors do not cost $131 million, and mirrors do not set their own terms. It is a structured public act of attention, with all the limits that implies, limits made tighter by the way this particular act of attention has been designed.

The grief that prompted this inquiry is real. The atrocity that prompted it is real. The danger is that the Commission’s structural choices produce a report whose findings can be contested on precisely the grounds its architects could have foreseen and avoided – and that what needed to change goes on not changing, as it too often does.

When the report is filed and the Commission is wound up and the $131 million has been fully acquitted, there will still be a mother in Australia deciding, every morning, whether her children can walk out the door wearing who they are. The Commission will not have answered that question for her. It will only have confirmed, at considerable expense and with considerable care, that the question needed asking.

With a knick-knack paddy whack, give a dog a bone. This old man came rolling home.

© Bakchos 2026 | Blak and Black est. 2010