Source : the age
The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion resumes at 10am today, headed by former high court judge Virginia Bell.
Stream today’s hearing here.
Assistant Commissioner Kirsty Heyward, who oversees police prosecutions and licensing enforcement, has begun providing evidence on how police gather information on people with gun licences.
Police currently use a “clunky” spreadsheet to see who is allocated matters under the internal intelligence, analytics, and information management software system, she said.
It means that multiple people are involved in assessing a single application for a gun licence, Heyward said, and they may have to go to different agencies to access information lodged at different times.
This presented a risk of a “slip or miss of information” between assessments of different adjudicators, the commission heard.
Police will begin trialling a “cradle to grave” case management system for people with licences to create a “total ownership” of decision making, she said.
Hudson had been questioned about Operation Shelter following yesterday’s evidence that it had been dismantled in the lead-up to the Bondi attack.
Operation Shelter was established to protect Sydney’s Jewish community following the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas.
It was reduced after police discovered a number of attacks on Jewish buildings had been “orchestrated by a limited number of people upon direction of others,” Hudson said, and following arrests, the “highly brazen attacks disappeared”.
Operation Shelter was then decentralised and absorbed by the Central Metropolitan Region for protests and proactive tasking.
A new Armed Response Command launched in response to the terror attack may not be fully realised until 2028, the commission has heard.
The new command will have access to weapons such as long arms while on patrol. It will create an additional 250 positions, including 210 armed frontline officers and 40 others in the command structure and intelligence.
“Obviously, on the 14th of December, our police officers were placed at significant risk being in a gunfight armed with nine millimetre locks against long arms,” Hudson told the commission.
“It is expected that the new armed response command team will be in a position to respond differently or more rapidly than the current capability, for example, the riot squad or the [tactical operations unit],” he said.
However, the new command is between 18 months and two years away as officers undergo training and police recruit graduates to backfill positions.
Continuing his evidence, Hudson said Commonwealth and state law enforcement, security, and intelligence agencies each had “different interpretations” on how information is shared between agencies.
NSW Police had a “very open” interpretation of the Protective Security Policy Framework, which governs what information can be shared, but said other agencies weren’t as transparent.
“If there is risk or threat, we will share information with other agencies, but other agencies can, on occasions, not be so forthcoming, and that has created a difficulty in dealing with other agencies in terms of the relationship with information sharing,” he said.
“Getting information to the areas where it needs to be, in my opinion, should be the priority to be appropriately addressed, rather than relying upon the [framework], and as a justification for not sharing information.”
Deputy Commissioner David Hudson told the commission he believed giving the Community Security Group, which provides security services to the Jewish community, additional powers or privileges would be “problematic”.
In his statement, read to the commission, Hudson said CSG does not and should not supplant or displace the role of the police in protecting all members of the community, and police would have “considerable reservations” about granting additional law enforcement powers or privileges to CSG.
“Isolating a particular group for additional powers within our community is problematic. It creates a disconnect between groups. It can cause friction between groups if one particular element of society is afforded privileges that others aren’t,” Hudson said.
In the days after the Bondi massacre, Premier Chris Minns floated giving CSG greater ability to carry weapons. That position appears to have been walked back.
Deputy Commissioner David Hudson has begun providing evidence, telling the commission that the counterterrorism command did not require additional funding following the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas.
Hudson said there had been “incremental increases” to the command alongside restructuring, which integrated additional units and officers into the counterterrorism command.
When Operation Shelter was launched following the October 7 attack and the threat level was increased, Hudson said additional resources weren’t needed because resources hadn’t been reduced when the threat level had previously been downgraded.
“We didn’t reduce our capability, and subsequently, when it was increased, we didn’t have a need for additional resources,” he said.
The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion resumes at 10am today, headed by former high court judge Virginia Bell.
Stream today’s hearing here.
Sydney writer Nikki Goldstein was in an unsurvivable coma when she was given “last rites” by Rabbi Eli Schlanger in 2022, who blew his shofar, an ancient ram’s horn sounded on special days to stir the soul.
Twenty-four hours later, Goldstein’s lungs began to repair, and within days, she was moved to a general ward in the hospital, where she recovered.
Three years later, it was Schlanger who would die, killed in the Bondi Beach massacre on the first night of Hanukkah on December 14, 2025.
Goldstein started writing a book based on conversations between a questioning Jew and a guiding one, Conversations with My Rabbi, which was launched on Tuesday at Chabad Bondi.
Read the article by the Herald’s Alexandra Smith here.
There are just two witnesses scheduled to appear at the royal commission today. They are NSW Police Deputy Commissioner Investigations and Counter-Terrorism David Hudson, and Assistant Commissioner Police Prosecutions and Licensing Enforcement Command Kirsty Heyward.
As the commission heard yesterday, a taskforce set up to combat antisemitism, share intelligence and patrol high-risk Jewish events was dismantled by NSW Police in the lead-up to the terror attack.
Jewish community leaders said they were not told Operation Shelter had been wound back in 2025 to focus on protests only.
The commission has heard from Jewish security group CSG that police had declined entreaties to permanently station officers at the Bondi Beach gathering after their warning of a probable risk of terror attack.
