A homemade bomb was thrown into a crowd of about 2,000 people at Perth's Forrest Place on January 26, during Invasion Day commemorations. The device was packed with ball bearings, screws, and other projectiles. Renae Isaacs-Guthridge, a Curtin University academic and Noongar-Yamatji woman, told a federal parliamentary inquiry on Monday that she, her children, mother, and sister "should be dead." Liam Alexander Hall, a Perth man, has been charged with terrorism offences and remains in custody; his lawyers signal they will plead not guilty by reason of insanity The Guardian.

One key detail shapes the inquiry's focus: Western Australia police did not classify the incident as a terror attack until nine days after it occurred. That delay has become a recurring point of scrutiny, suggesting a gap between the attack's severity and how institutions treated it.

Isaacs-Guthridge's testimony centred on this institutional gap. She told the committee that many in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community felt ignored and dismissed in the aftermath. She attributed that neglect to the fact that the crowd targeted was overwhelmingly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander—raising the question of whether the response would have been different had the victims been from a different community.

Rally organiser Fabian Yarran provided detail on what happened before the attack. Organisers, he testified, had received an advance warning from community members that the "Nazi party" was planning to target the rally. This threat was passed on to police and state MPs before January 26. Yet despite that warning, police did not meet with rally organisers before the event. After the device was discovered, Yarran said, police did not explain to organisers why the crowd was being moved or disclose that a bomb had been found. These gaps in communication raise questions about whether law enforcement shared information effectively with community organisers handling an event that had been flagged as a potential target The Guardian.

Former Indigenous affairs minister Ken Wyatt connected the Perth incident to a wider national climate. He told the committee that the defeat of the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum appeared to normalise racism and online hate, and "emboldened" some racist commentary afterward. His testimony treats the Forrest Place attack not as an isolated event but as part of a longer arc—linking a specific alleged terrorism act to a national political and social climate that had been building for over two years.

The Inquiry's Broader Reach

Monday's Perth hearing is one stop in a wider inquiry process. The joint parliamentary committee has taken evidence in multiple jurisdictions: hearings were held in Adelaide on May 1 and May 8, with Senator Kerrynne Liddle as a questioner, and another public hearing took place 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 a systemic failure rather than isolated incidents. This growing record spans workplace and education settings alongside the immediate aftermath of violence, giving the committee a comparatively broad base of evidence.

The inquiry was established directly in response to the Perth incident. On March 5, a ministerial media release announced the parliamentary inquiry into racism, hate, and violence against First Nations people, a month after ABC News reported on March 4 that the alleged bombing had prompted the federal response ABC News. The incident had already reached the floor of federal Parliament weeks earlier: both the Senate and House of Representatives discussed it on February 3, with a House member calling it "attempted murder."

What threads these parliamentary moments together—from the February floor debates through the March inquiry announcement to Monday's testimony—is a case built largely on the delayed terrorism classification and the disputed adequacy of the police response. That distinction matters: the inquiry's terms of reference concern how state and federal institutions handled racism and hate, not the criminal prosecution of Hall, which proceeds separately through the courts.

The 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 Perth, of how 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. The broader question the committee faces is whether existing threat-assessment and community-liaison practices are adequate when the community at risk is Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. Wyatt's testimony linking the bombing to the post-referendum political climate extends the frame for the inquiry's eventual findings well beyond the specifics of Forrest Place.