Andrew L. Urban.
With just two months before the Bell Royal Commissioner is due to deliver her final report and recommendations to the Governor General, the Commission has a mountain of more than 20,000 submissions to absorb & analyse (including mine) – on top of the labour intensive job of distilling and analysing all the testimony of the 347 witnesses that appeared before it over 62 days. This is a job for AI – for two main reasons.
The potential uses of AI for document classification, searching, transcription, summarising and identifying connections across evidence are obvious, but there has been no indication that the Commission has or will do so. (The Commission heard directly from Anthropic about its Claude AI system and its ability to detect antisemitic material. Anthropic told the Commission that it had tested more than 50,000 Claude conversations and that only five involved requests to generate antisemitic material. That is evidence about AI, rather than evidence that the Commission itself is using AI.)
Consider this: even if Commission staff have already concluded analysis and summaries on the 347 witness statements during the 62 days that the Commission was proceeding (at the rate of more than five per day), there remains a pile of over 20,000 written submissions to analyse and summarise – and that’s before drawing conclusions for its report and recommendations. That requires an average of some 60 submissions to assess each day (if starting now), seven days a week. And that’s without allowing time to write Commissioner Bell’s final report. It is inconceivable that all that work can be effectively managed in the short time available. (Calls to extend the deadline have been ignored by both the Commissioner and the Prime Minister.)
So workload handling capability is the first main reason.
The second main reason is the more important: AI would enable a thorough, politically neutral set of summaries & conclusions on which recommendations can be built. The recommendations cannot be left to AI; that is Commissioner Bell’s responsibility. But the underlying summary of the submissions is the basis for those recommendations. I do not suggest that Commissioner Bell is untrustworthy to make politically neutral recommendations, but given her decision to permit pro-Palestinian lawyers to spend an hour interrogating David Ossip, president of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, on 4 August 2026, during Hearing Block 7, her critics would want some safeguards against another lapse in judgement.
The questioning was conducted by counsel for the Palestine Action Group (PAG; Dominic Toomey SC) and the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN; Ragni Mathur SC). On August 28, 2026, while the Commission was sitting, the PAG was declared a global terrorist organisation by the US.
Within the requirements of the Commission is the obvious need to fully reflect the various strands of the submissions. Of course, as the author of one submission myself, I am biased in wishing to see it echoed in the final recommendations. I have already stated what I believe should be a significant element of Commissioner Bell’s advice (see below) – and I hasten to add it is echoed by many who gave evidence, not least within the pages of Bondi Terror, the just published (excellent) book by Sharri Markson and Alex Ryvchin which not only recounts the terror attack itself in gripping detail but explores the aftermath and the lessons to be drawn.
It is probably beyond the Commission’s scope to conclude from the volumes of testimony that the real enemy to the people of Gaza was (and is) the Palestinian leadership of Hamas, not the Jewish leadership of Israel. It was Hamas that ruled Gaza, that oppressed the population, that used it cynically as disposable fodder in its pursuit of demonising Israel. Every dead Gazan was a PR win for Hamas.
We’ll wait for the public release the Bell report. In the meantime, these are my recommendations re Section d) of the Terms of Reference: countering the spread of ideologically and religiously motivated extremism in Australia:
1-Ensure that Federal legislation criminalises all aspects of displaying ideologically and religiously motivated extremism, including marches, protests, flags, posters, symbols, slogans;
2-Prosecute offenders as quickly as practical and deport convicted offenders if possible;
3-Respond immediately and forcefully to any display of antisemitism in public forums;
4-Make all such responses public;
5-Require all Imams to instruct Muslim preachers to abide by the laws, or risk severe penalties;
6-Refrain from denigrating Israel both domestically and in international forums;
7-Refrain from lifting aid to UNRWA;
8-Grant visas to all Israelis unless the applicant is a designated terrorist;
9-Impose financial penalties on educational institutions that fail to protect Jewish students;
10-Prosecute individual educators for breaches of hate speech laws and deny funding for academics promoting anti-Jewish ideology.
I lay much of the blame for the explosion of brutal displays of antisemitism after October 7 on the Prime Minister. His was a timidly mumbled response to the agitated mob at the Opera House, for example, chanting “Fuck the Jews!”. What would he say and do if an agitated mob chanted “Fuck the Aboriginals!”
If he needs a text to guide his apology, he can do worse than refer to the words of Dr Lorraine Finlay:
“As I come to the end of my term as Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner, I have spent a lot of time reflecting on what I could have done differently. My greatest regret is that I did not speak out earlier and more clearly about the rise in antisemitism, particularly following the Sydney Opera House protests.”