The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, Courier Mail, The Advertiser | 4 MAY 2026

The Spaces Between the Words Tell the Real Story

I was trained to read the spaces. Here's what I see.

Today, for the first time, the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion will hear from Jewish Australians about the lives they have been living. And, as with its interim report released last week, the words that remain unsaid will tell us as much as the words themselves.

More than 5,700 Australians have already submitted to the Commission. Nearly 2,000 of those in the past week alone. More than 1,000 submitters are not Jewish, meaning this is not only a community crying out, but a country beginning to reckon with what it has allowed to happen. Their testimonies span education, employment, the arts, sport, health and online life. Together they describe not a single catastrophic event, but a slow, corrosive erosion. Quiet prejudice that became hurtful words, then harmful actions, then deadly violence on a beach on a Sunday evening at a festival of light.

That is the story the hearings will begin to tell. And it is the reason the interim report, released just days ago, matters as much as it does.

The interim report is chapter one of a book whose last word will not be written until December. Measured in tone, meticulous in its construction, it is nonetheless one of the most damning documents in Australian public life: a picture of a national security system holding fragments of a puzzle it never fully assembled. Here, too, the white spaces speak.

Two themes stand out.

The first is information sharing. Every intelligence practitioner knows that no single agency ever holds the full picture. The system works (when it works) by assembling the mosaic. Each piece contributes what the others can't see alone. But completing that picture requires genuine trust, transparency and a willingness to share across agency lines. The structures exist - the ANZCTC, the Joint Counter-Terrorism Teams, and others - but the report is clear that there is room for improvement.

I have sat in too many rooms where agencies speak the language of openness and collaboration while harbouring cultures of territoriality and control. The Commission has identified those gaps. The hearings will tell us what they cost.

The second is a failure to operationalise the threat. A complete mosaic should produce not only a coherent picture of risk, but a proportionate response to it. That is what lies in the gaps. The Counter-Terrorism Coordinator role was part-time. JCTTs were not functioning optimally. Insufficient national exercises had been conducted. A National Firearms Agreement remains unfinished.

And in a world where ASIO assessed that a terrorist attack was more likely than not, and an antisemitic one the most probable of all, an outdoor Chanukah event drawing up to a thousand people did not warrant a comprehensive written risk assessment (or so the white spaces say).

The interim report's recommendations are appropriate and should be implemented immediately. But the central question is whether they would prevent an attack from happening again tomorrow.

The threat environment is not receding. Antisemitic terrorist attacks continue globally, including in London just this week. New research shows that belief in a tolerant Australia, and acceptance of the Jewish community, has declined in the last two years. The final report must be the turning point - not another chapter in a story that keeps getting darker.

The interim report tells us what the system failed to do. Today's hearings will tell us what that failure felt like.

Read the white spaces here too. The Commission will hear from university students whose campuses became places of routine hostility. Artists excluded from once-safe creative spaces. Workers removing their Star of David before catching the train. Parents, like me, whose children walk past armed guards each morning just to get to school - not because of a single attack - but because the threats against Jewish Australians are real and unrelenting.

And then there are the ones who could not bring themselves to speak at all. The submissions made anonymously. Those too afraid to testify or doing so under pseudonyms. Witnesses terrified of being doxxed, others who needed protection just to walk into the hearing room. Their words, and their silence, are as much a part of this record as anything on the page.

This is not the Australia that Jewish Australians have loved and contributed to for generations. And it is not the Australia most Australians believe they live in.

As we move from chapter one into chapter two, the Commission will explore not just the failures of 14 December, but the years of language tolerated, incidents unaddressed and warnings unheeded that wrote the conditions for that day.

What this country owes the people who will take the stand, and those who could not, is not sympathy. It is action. To listen. To understand. To accept what the evidence shows. And then to act, decisively, before the next chapter writes itself.

The testimony beginning today is not an addendum to the counter-terrorism inquiry.

It is the reason for it.

Tahli Blicblau is CEO of The Dor Foundation; a national not-for-profit established to combat antisemitism and hate and strengthen social cohesion in Australia. She a former intelligence practitioner and senior executive of the NSW Crime Commission.