On January 26, a homemade bomb was thrown into a crowd of about 2,000 people gathered in Perth for an Invasion Day rally. The device contained ball bearings and screws—designed to cause injury. A man named Liam Alexander Hall has been charged with terrorism offences and is in custody The Guardian.

Renae Isaacs-Guthridge was in that crowd with her children, mother, and sister. She told a federal inquiry this week that by luck, they were not badly hurt—but they "should be dead." She and other witnesses are speaking to an investigation launched by the federal government to understand how this attack happened and how authorities responded.

Here's what makes this important: the police took nine days to officially call it a terror attack. That delay matters because it shapes how seriously an incident is treated—and whether people in the community feel protected.

What Went Wrong Before and After

Rally organiser Fabian Yarran told the inquiry that community members had warned him beforehand. Someone had told organisers that a far-right group was planning to target the event. Yarran said he passed this warning to police and to elected officials.

But here's where the story gets troubling. Even with that warning, police never met with the rally organisers before the event to plan safety. And after the bomb was found, police did not explain what had happened to the people running the rally. Organisers found out about the bomb later, not from law enforcement directly The Guardian.

When you flag a threat to police and they do not talk to you before an event, or explain what went wrong after—that is a communication breakdown. It raises a question: if this crowd had been from a different background, would police have handled it differently?

The Bigger Picture

The federal inquiry is not just looking at Perth. It has held hearings in Adelaide and Canberra as well. In Adelaide, witnesses testified that racism is driving Aboriginal teachers out of Australian schools. The inquiry is building a wide record of how institutions treat Indigenous Australians when things go wrong.

Former minister Ken Wyatt told the inquiry something else worth noting. He said that when Australians voted against a proposal to recognise Indigenous people in the constitution (the Voice referendum in 2023), it seemed to open the door to more racist speech and activity online. He connected the bombing to that broader climate—not as a separate event, but as part of a longer pattern.

The federal government set up this inquiry after news reports brought the Perth incident to public attention. In March, parliament announced the investigation. Members of parliament had already debated the bombing in February, with one calling it "attempted murder."

What the inquiry is really testing is whether Australia's systems for protecting communities are fair and equal. When an Indigenous event is flagged as a potential target, and a bomb goes off, and police delay saying it was terrorism—those gaps matter. They matter because they show whether the people running the country take threats to Indigenous Australians as seriously as threats to other Australians.