A woman who says a homemade bomb landed at her feet during Perth's Invasion Day rally told a federal parliamentary inquiry on Monday that she, her children, mother and sister "should be dead." Renae Isaacs-Guthridge, a Curtin University academic and Noongar-Yamatji woman, was one of three witnesses to give evidence at the Perth hearing of the inquiry into the nature, prevalence and impact of racism, hate and violence towards First Nations people, alongside rally organiser Fabian Yarran and former Indigenous affairs minister Ken Wyatt The Guardian.

The device — packed with ball bearings, screws and other projectiles — was thrown into a crowd of roughly 2,000 people gathered at Forrest Place on January 26 for Invasion Day commemorations The Guardian. Western Australia police did not classify the incident as a terror attack until nine days after the throwing, a delay that has since become a recurring point of scrutiny in both the inquiry and prior parliamentary debate. Perth man Liam Alexander Hall has been charged with terrorism offences and remains in custody; his lawyers have signalled an intention to plead not guilty by reason of insanity.

Isaacs-Guthridge's testimony centred on the gap between the severity of the attack and the institutional response to it. She told the committee that many in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community felt ignored and dismissed in the aftermath, attributing that neglect to the fact that the crowd targeted was overwhelmingly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. That framing — an act of mass-casualty intent met with delayed official recognition — has shaped much of the inquiry's Perth session.

Yarran's account added detail to the sequence of events preceding the attack. He testified that organisers had received a tipoff from community members warning that the "Nazi party" was planning to target the rally, and that this threat, though unspecified in nature, was passed on to police and several state MPs ahead of January 26. Despite that advance warning, Yarran said police did not meet with rally organisers before the event. He further testified that after the device was discovered, police did not explain to organisers why the crowd was being moved on, nor did they disclose that a bomb had been found. The account raises questions about information-sharing protocols between law enforcement and community organisers handling an event flagged in advance as a potential target.

Wyatt's evidence took the inquiry into wider territory, linking the Perth incident to a broader climate of racial hostility. He told the committee that the defeat of the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum normalised racism and online hate, and "emboldened" some racist commentary in its wake. His testimony situates the Forrest Place attack within a longer arc rather than as an isolated event, connecting a specific act of alleged terrorism to a national political and social climate that predates it by more than two years.

An Inquiry Building a Record Across Cities

Monday's Perth hearing is one stop in a wider inquiry process. The joint parliamentary committee has now taken evidence in multiple jurisdictions: hearings were held on May 1 and again on May 8 in Adelaide, where Senator Kerrynne Liddle served as a questioner, and a further public hearing was held in Canberra on June 26 Parliament of Australia. Testimony from the May 1 session included evidence that racism is driving First Nations educators out of Australian schools, described as reflecting systemic failure rather than isolated incidents. The cumulative hearing record now spans workplace and education settings as well as the immediate aftermath of a violent attack, giving the committee a comparatively broad evidentiary base to draw on when it reports.

The inquiry itself was established in direct response to the Perth incident. A ministerial media release dated March 5 announced the parliamentary inquiry into racism, hate and violence against First Nations people Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, a month after ABC News reported on March 4 that the alleged bombing attempt had prompted the federal move ABC News. The Perth incident had already reached the floor of federal Parliament weeks earlier: both the Senate and the House of Representatives discussed it in sittings on February 3, with a House member characterising the act as "attempted murder."

The throughline connecting these parliamentary moments — from the February floor debates through the March inquiry announcement to Monday's Perth testimony — is a case built largely on the delayed terrorism classification and the disputed adequacy of the police response, rather than on dispute over what was thrown or where. That distinction matters procedurally: the inquiry's terms of reference concern the pattern and institutional handling of racism and hate, not the criminal prosecution of Hall, which proceeds separately through the courts.

The broader significance of Monday's session lies less in any single piece of testimony than in what the inquiry is assembling: a documented record, spanning Adelaide, Canberra and now Perth, of how state and federal institutions responded — and in some tellings, failed to respond — when a threat against an Indigenous community event was flagged in advance and then apparently realised. Wyatt's testimony linking that outcome to the post-referendum political climate gives the committee a frame for its eventual findings that extends well beyond the specifics of Forrest Place, into questions of whether existing threat-assessment and community-liaison practices are adequate when the community at risk is Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.