The attempted bombing at an Invasion Day rally in Boorloo/Perth must not be treated as an isolated incident.
It is part of a longer, deeply entrenched pattern of racism and violence directed at First Peoples — a pattern which continues to be minimised, overlooked, or ignored by much of the media and politicians.
It is only by chance that nobody was injured when the device failed to detonate. The alleged bomb, reportedly consisting of a glass container filled with explosive liquid and surrounded by ball bearings and screws, had the potential to cause catastrophic harm.
That this did not occur does not diminish the severity of the act. If anything, it should sharpen the focus on conditions which made such an attack conceivable in the first place.
Instead, the media response has been disturbingly muted. Some outlets buried the story deep within their coverage; others did not report it at all. Far more coverage was given to Pauline Hanson speaking at a right-wing rally, where they spread falsities about immigration and race.
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This lack of urgency reflects a broader and more troubling trend. Simply, violence and racism against Indigenous people are not treated with the same gravity or outrage as violence against other communities.
The response to the attempted bombing on Monday mirrors the inadequate coverage of last year's attack on Camp Sovereignty in Naarm — an incident which left multiple people injured and could easily have resulted in far greater harm.
Camp Sovereignty, established in 2006 by Krautungalung Elder Robbie Thorpe, is a sacred site. A place of ceremony, community, and reflection. It is also the resting place of repatriated remains of 38 Aboriginal Victorians.
That such a site was targeted should have prompted national reckoning.
It did not.
Many of those allegedly involved in that attack were linked to the National Socialist Network (NSN), a violent far-right white supremacist group. The ideology of the NSN and related movements has been echoed in extremist manifestos, including those cited by Australian man Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 Muslims in Christchurch in 2019 — an attack rarely spoken about in the media when it comes to terrorism or violence.
The lineage of this hate is clear, yet the response to its manifestation against Indigenous people remains strikingly subdued.
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In the aftermath of the Camp Sovereignty attack, Senator Lidia Thorpe drew attention to this disparity.
"Now this is our place of worship. People were assaulted. Flags were stomped on the ground. Fires were put out. Sacred fires were put out," she said.
"Just because we don't have bricks and mortar. We have our land, and this is how we worship our land and our water and our people and our animals in the sky, and the air that we breathe. We have a spirituality that you can't always see, and that's certainly what you find at Camp Sovereignty."
Despite the seriousness of the attack, it has not been designated as a hate crime or an act of terrorism, despite calls from Aboriginal communities and crossbench MPs. Nor has there been the same chorus of condemnation from commentators who rightly decry extremist violence when it targets other Australians.
Antisemitism, particularly in recent months, has been widely and appropriately condemned. Attacks on Jewish Australians have generated sustained outrage and comprehensive coverage, even before the heartbreaking and horrific events at Bondi.
This is as it should be. No community should be subjected to hatred or violence.
But the contrast is stark.
Racism directed at or about Indigenous Australians rarely receives the same level of attention, empathy, or sustained concern. When public figures call this out, they are often attacked themselves.
When ABC host Lara Tingle called out racism in Australia in 2024, the response was predictable: Editorials focused less on the racism she identified and more on discrediting her for naming it.
"This is partly why our media is so timid in addressing racism - because powerful voices try to shut down conversations that challenge the status quo," race discrimination commissioner Giri Sivaraman said at the time.
Laura Tingle has been "counselled" for what, exactly? Expressing her opinion that this is a racist country was not politically partisan nor was it a comment on any party's policies, so what precisely was the problem with it? ABC, seriously, get a grip.
— marquelawyers (@marquelawyers) May 29, 2024
At National Indigenous Times, the toll of racism is visible on a daily basis. Our social media moderators are forced to read and remove a constant stream of violent and dehumanising abuse. As contributor Nicole Brown wrote on January 26, the scale and severity of the abuse Indigenous people endure online is relentless.
"For many non-Indigenous Australians, social media is harmless. For us, it is where racism hides in plain sight. It is where truth-telling collides with denial. It is where the reality of being Aboriginal is held up against the image Australia wants to project about itself," Mr Brown wrote in a powerful piece.
"What I saw reminded me that racism in this country is not subtle. It is public, confident and unashamed. People type this hate under their real names, with employers, family, clients and children visible. That confidence does not come from nowhere. It comes from a country that has never fully confronted its own history."
Events such as the attempted bombing in Boorloo do not emerge in a vacuum. They are the logical outcome of a society that too often excuses, normalises, or ignores racism against First Nations people. Silence — from media, from politicians, from the public — creates space for hatred to escalate.
It should not take an attempted act of mass violence to expose how deeply embedded the problem remains.
