The facts: a man threw a bomb into a Perth/Boorloo Invasion Day rally. The protest was against the historic and ongoing racist treatment of Aboriginal people in Australia. Luckily, the bomb did not explode. But the police said that if it had, it would have caused a “mass casualty event”. That hundreds of First Nations people and their supporters narrowly escaped slaughter ought to have triggered national outrage.
Instead, the incident has been minimised and buried.
This attempted violence toward First Nations people and those who stand in solidarity should not be viewed as an isolated incident. It is reflective of the normalisation of violent racism and the suppression of those who stand in solidarity with oppressed people. Globally, the war in Gaza has normalised the slaughter of Palestinians. In the USA, Trump’s Gestapo thugs in ICE have normalised the kidnapping and brutalisation of migrants and the murder of protesters. Here, mass marches of racists were encouraged and built by the Murdoch press and the political right, resulting in a physical attack by neo-Nazis on an Aboriginal protest camp in Melbourne.
In Perth, the legitimacy of this year’s Invasion Day mobilisation was deliberately undermined when the City of Perth cancelled a regular Survival Day concert organised by Noongar groups, replacing it with a Gina Rinehart–Hancock Prospecting-sponsored Australia Day event. That decision sent a clear political message: Aboriginal resistance is disposable, while corporate nationalism is welcome. This is the atmosphere in which someone felt empowered to throw a bomb at a rally for Indigenous justice.
The attempted attack was designed to terrorise. But it also mirrors the everyday, systemic violence meted out to Australia’s First Nations populations. Noongar people in south-west Western Australia are subjected to extreme and systemic racist violence on a daily basis. They face significant social and economic oppression, characterised by severe economic disadvantage and deep-seated health inequalities. WA also has some of the highest incarceration rates in the country, with the adult Aboriginal imprisonment rate reported at 3,663 per 100,000. Inside the prisons, Aboriginal people are tortured, often kept in solitary confinement, denied medical care and subjected to racist harassment by guards.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Unit 18, a detention facility for young people, located within the maximum-security Casuarina Prison. Perth’s coroner, Philip Urquhart, condemned the conditions inside the prison as “inhuman”. In the wake of the suicide of 16-year-old boy Cleveland Dodd, his mother said:
“I believe that Cleveland’s death was the product of institutional abuse and neglect, and it breaks my heart to know that Cleveland spent 23 hours a day, or more, for days on end, locked down in a filthy cell with no end in sight. I can understand why my son lost hope and the will to live.”
A society that jails kids and keeps them in tiny, airless, sunless kennels is sick. It is a depraved and racist society, and it is no wonder that outside of those prisons, individuals feel justified in bringing that violence to the streets of our cities.
This is the backdrop to the systematic and hypocritical downplaying of the incident by the mainstream media and politicians. The initial media coverage buried the story as merely one element of Australia Day celebrations and Invasion Day rallies. Right-wing political figures such as Queensland Premier David Crisafulli preferred instead to focus on the burning of an Australian flag by protesters in Brisbane, describing it as “disgraceful as you get”.
It is no wonder that Crisafulli thinks the burning of a piece of cloth is worse than the attempted murder of Aboriginal people and their supporters when his government wants to be able to jail kids as young as 10, which would overwhelmingly affect Indigenous kids.
Many of the political figures who, in the wake of Bondi, denounced the scourge of racism and antisemitism offered not even a whimper of condemnation of this racist attack. Pauline Hanson, despite her newly minted role as crusader against antisemitism, also refused to condemn the open antisemite and Nazi who spoke at the Sydney March for Australia and concluded his speech by chanting “Heil White Australia”.
This silence is not accidental. It reflects whose lives are considered worthy of protection.
In the wake of the attempted bombing, some voices—including from within progressive circles—have called for increased policing and tighter “anti-terror” legislation. This is a dangerous mistake. The police are not a neutral force standing between racism and its victims. They are a central institution through which racist violence is administered. Aboriginal people are already among the most policed, surveilled and incarcerated populations on the planet. Expanding police powers will not protect them; it will be used against them.
So-called anti-terror laws have never been applied evenly. They are overwhelmingly deployed against Muslims and migrants, while white supremacist violence is downplayed as individual pathology or “lone wolf” behaviour. Strengthening these laws will give the state more tools to repress protests, criminalise dissent and surveil those fighting racism — not those perpetrating it.
The answer to racist terror is not more cops, more cages or more authoritarian laws. It is collective resistance: mass movements that confront racism in the streets, expose its institutional foundations and challenge the political forces that nurture it.
