The Baby Premier and the Spy Boss Who Warned of Antisemitism

Towards the end of last week, New South Wales premier Chris Minns and ASIO director general Mike Burgess appeared separately in The Australian in an apparent attempt to rewrite history around significant events that have been spurred locally by the Israeli perpetrated Gaza genocide, and in particular, around the notorious Sydney Opera House protest and the Bondi Beach mass murder.

In terms of Minns, he was interviewed by Sky News host Sharri Markson, and in his retelling of events, the top minister has suggested that he only permitted the 9 October 2023 pro-Palestinian rally to take place after he’d been advised by NSW police to use some “bullshit” policing strategy, and he didn’t know any better, because he was then a “baby premier”.

Markson was the journalist who too spoke to the nation’s top domestic spy. And Burgess told the Sky News host that he has “deep regret” about the 14 December 2025 Bondi Beach massacre, which saw ISIS adherents kill 15 people at a Jewish event on Gadigal land, as he’d been warning repeatedly about “antisemitism posing the country’s deadliest threat” before the mass shooting.

So, not only have the NSW premier and the ASIO spy boss exonerated themselves from any blame around their actions leading up to these incidents that have since been central to the national debate, but in doing so, Minns appears to be shifting responsibility to the NSW police management of that time, while in terms of Burgess, it’s the Albanese cabinet that didn’t heed his warnings.

Yet, the ultimate culprits behind these events, according to the top officials, are grassroots pro-Palestinians. And even though that movement rejected the group of antisemitic chanters at the Opera House, in the end, these antigenocide activists are being accused of having inspired the Bondi mass murder. And these interviews add more fuel to suggestions that the group may be outlawed.

“Bad situation worse”

In response to a question from Markson about whether the policing strategy progressed by NSW police was “to allow protesters to let off steam”, the NSW premier replied that “The short answer to that is yes, and I think that manifested itself when I was a new premier – a baby premier – and we saw the march move from the Town Hall down to the Opera House.”

“The constant advice I got from police at the time was ‘that’s the way we do it, we marshal protests’,” Minns continued. “‘We just let them go a few more streets, let them get it out of their system, and then they dissipate and there’s not a conflict’”. And the top minister further added that NSW police management put it in terms of not making “a bad situation worse”.

The 9 October 2023 pro-Palestinian rally that took place on Gadigal land, out the front of the Sydney Opera House, occurred as the building had the Israeli flag projected onto it in remembrance of the Israeli victims of the 7 October Hamas attacks on Israel. The rally was opposing the continued apartheid system and occupation that the Israelis subject the Palestinians to.

A controversy blew up around this protest, and has lingered ever since, which involved a small group chanting “Fuck the Jews”, prior to the rest of the crowd shutting them down. But by the next day, the Australian Jewish Association had distributed footage on social media that showed protesters chanting, “Gas the Jews”. However, forensic analysis later found this clip had been doctored.

Minns insisted there was no bad faith behind the suggested policing strategy, but rather he considers it doesn’t work, because protesters tend to turn into an angry mob spouting hatred. And he added that it was “bullshit”, because people don’t go back to loving their “Jewish brothers and sisters” after such rallies, and he learnt “a bitter lesson that night” that’s guided his government ever since.

The Sky News reporter further notes that Minns was sworn in on 28 March 2023, which was only six months prior to the Sydney Opera House incident. She paraphrased Minns as suggesting that the policing strategy simply led to “condoning antisemitism, casual racism and inflamed rhetoric”.

“We’ve seen this over and over again, that with a certain group in our community, if you give them an inch, they will take a mile, and it becomes a greenlight for worse and worse and worse behaviour,” Minns said, as he appeared to be referring to the state’s large pro-Palestinian/antigenocide movement, which the NSW police aggressively set upon at the 9 February 2026 anti-Herzog rally.

“Deep regret”

Burgess told of his “deep regret” about his repeated warnings regarding the threat antisemitism was posing, while “others in society”, who “should have heeded his public warnings about the urgency” of the matter, failed to act. And what this lack of action translated to, the spy boss explained, was antisemitism being “normalised”, which “increased the permission for politically motivated violence”.

“I was concerned about the trajectory of our threat environment, and I made that known publicly,” said Burgess. “Of course, it is a matter of deep regret. Could I have done more? Perhaps yes, I could have shouted stronger, but in the end, I would suggest security is a shared responsibility in society, and others actually had to take up that call, either challenge me for more details or take action.”

In terms of the trajectory of antisemitism, the top spy told Markson that it was the unchecked antisemitism that occurred at the 9 October 2023 Opera House protest, which, going “largely unchallenged, became normalised”. Burgess further elaborates that this should have been the moment for “law enforcement or political and community leaders” to call out this hatred of Jews.

“I was concerned about this and concerned about behaviours being normalised,” Burgess made clear.

“Those behaviours being normalised raised the temperature, which increased the permission for politically motivated violence and, sadly, we saw that: from threatening, intimidating behaviour through to direct targeting of people, businesses and places of worship, through to killings of Jewish Australians.”

However, by attempting to draw a throughline that connects the pro-Palestinian movement that commenced mobilising on 9 October 2023 to the ISIS inspired mass killing in Bondi in December 2025, doesn’t account for the fact that the Islamic State is opposed to the Palestinian cause. So, whilst the terrorists were obviously antisemitic, they were distinctly not pro-Palestinian.

Silencing opposition to a genocide

The further dubious proof that the NSW constituency has been racked with antisemitism were the 13 major arson and graffiti attacks that occurred across Greater Sydney over the summer of 2024/25, as these so-called antisemitic attacks, which commenced as clear anti-Israel incidents, have been debunked as having been directed and staged by local organised crime figures then located overseas.

As for the Minns and Burgess interviews, these were carried out by Markson for her upcoming book Bondi Terror, which has been coauthored by Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin. So, the head of government and intelligence did not deliver their statements in a coordinated manner last week, but rather the Murdoch press simply published them at once.

The move to associate the local pro-Palestinian movement with the Bondi Beach massacre was first progressed by the NSW premier in the immediate aftermath of the Eastern Suburbs mass shooting, when he suggested that protest organisers had been “unleashing forces they can’t control”, which implied that their activities had somehow inspired the antisemitic killings at the seaside.

And while the two top officials quietly admitted to the host that they weren’t to blame for two antisemitic incidents that occurred on their watch, the minister and the spy have not only passed the buck onto other officials, but ultimately, the finger has been pointed at the pro-Palestinian movement that commenced mobilising on 9 October 2023, as the main offender.

The 9 February 2026 anti-Herzog rally on Gadigal land at Sydney Town Hall involved 3,000 NSW police officers bashing and brutalising a crowd of 20,000 pro-Palestinian demonstrators. However, the premier, the NSW police minister and the NSW police commissioner have all refused to condemn this treatment and have rather sanctioned it as officers just following the orders of the state.

So, as these top officials continue to assert that the pro-Palestinians are “a certain group in our community” whose mobilisations against the Gaza genocide are spurring an ever-increasing antisemitic crimewave, it might be questioned what the ultimate goal of this demonisation program is, and whether, just like in the US and the UK, the authorities are veering to outlaw the movement.

Main image: Mike Burgess 2023 by ASIO is licensed under CC BY 3.0. Chris Minns 2023 by NSW state is licensed under CC BY 4.0.