The government says the Bondi Junction attack isn't classed as terror-related, but should it be? Could it be?

Flowers have been left at the scene where six people were stabbed in an attack at Bondi Junction.  (ABC News: Brendan Esposito/David Sciasci)

On Tuesday morning, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation director-general Mike Burgess was taking questions on the incident involving a 16-year-old boy in Sydney that was being treated as an alleged terrorist attack.

Mr Burgess was asked why Monday night was ruled a terrorist attack, while Saturday’s stabbing rampage — where one man and five women were killed in Bondi Junction — was not.

“Simple answer is, to call it a terrorist act you need indications of, well, information or evidence that suggest actually the motivation was religiously motivated or ideologically motivated,” he told reporters.

“In the case of Saturday, that was not the case.

“In this case, the information we have and the police have before us indicates that is strongly the case. That is why it was called an act of terrorism.”

So why wasn’t Saturday a terrorist attack, according to authorities and experts? Would responses be different if it was? And will attacks on predominantly women ever be considered terrorism?

Why wasn’t Saturday a terrorist attack?  

The director-general made it clear that Saturday’s attack didn’t meet the criteria for a terrorist attack, that is it had not been done to coerce or influence the public or any government by intimidation, to advance a political, religious or ideological cause.

Katja Theodorakis is a national security expert with a specialty in the area of terrorism and extremism. She says when Mr Burgess was asked in a press conference why the first incident wasn’t declared as such, he pointed to the absence of that ideology, or religion as a motivator.

But she says, in her own opinion, it can be tricky to discern why the two are different. While the Bondi Junction attack wasn’t classified as a terrorist attack, she says it had the same effect as one, arguing that in terms of instilling terror and fear, Saturday’s attack was greater.

“It’s unprecedented that a baby would be stabbed deliberately as part of an attack that was targeting women, as it appears,” she says.

“We call terrorism propaganda of the deed where it’s very much that violence is used to communicate something. And in my professional opinion, whether that was the intent of the perpetrator in the Bondi attack, we can’t know. He’s dead, and they’re still trailing, I’m assuming, through sort of social media activity and whether he was part of any forum.

“But he left no manifesto, he didn’t seem to want to send that kind of deliberate political message. But he’s still sending a message, regardless of intent, because the act of violence communicates fear and terror.”

Deakin University’s Professor Greg Barton says that an important distinction of the Bondi Junction attacker that doesn’t fit the terrorist profile, was that he didn’t believe he was using violence to bring about change.

Would consequences be different if it was classed as a terrorist attack? 

Once a specific terrorist event has occurred, the Joint Counter Terrorism Team, which includes AFP and ASIO, works to investigate all aspects of the attack, including details of the alleged offender to whom they might be connected, and if they could cause any further threat to the community.

The NSW government has announced a coronial inquiry into the Bondi Junction attacks, investing $18 million and further investigations are ongoing.

Professor Barton says that while not designating the Bondi attacks as terrorism leaves questions over resources that would only be afforded to counterterrorism investigations, it suggests Australia needs more resourcing to understand male violence.

He says we should focus on both understanding why men engage in violence and preventing it from happening in the first place and investing resources in young men, addressing toxic masculinity. He believes there is clear evidence that prevention should be prioritised rather than dealing with problems after they occur.

Expanding the definition of terrorism might seem like a reasonable solution, however, Professor Barton argues that it could lead to inaccurate conclusions.

“This is not to undermine the damage angry men can, and do, inflict. Domestic violence is a bigger threat to Australians than terrorism,” Professor Barton says.

“Calling something a terrorist act doesn’t make it more or less serious than anything else, rather the categorisation is to provide conceptual clarity for the sake of the ensuing investigation.”

Have other countries classed attacks on predominantly women as terror-related? 

Last year, a Canadian judge found that a deadly 2020 attack on a Toronto massage parlour, where one woman was stabbed to death, was an act of terror inspired by the incel movement, broadcaster CBC reported.

Incel is an online subculture focused on members’ perceived inability to find romantic or sexual partners.  The attacker had said he had been inspired by another incel — short for “involuntarily celibate” — an attacker who drove a van into a crowd in Toronto in 2018.

It was believed to be the first time in Canada that a court had made a finding of incel-motivated terrorist activity by prosecuting the attacker as a terrorist.

In February 2021, ASIO announced it would be changing the way it categorised threat assessments, umbrella terms of “religiously motivated violent extremism” and “ideologically motivated violent extremism” to describe those seeking to do harm instead of terms like “Islamic extremism” and “right-wing extremism”.

Mr Burgess, at the time, mentioned incels as one of the groups ASIO would be looking to take more seriously. There have been no attacks in Australia as yet committed by some who claimed to be an incel.

NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb said earlier in the week that while investigations continued into Bondi Junction attacker Joel Cauchi and a motive for the attack, it was “obvious” to her that he was targeting women.

“The videos speak for themselves, don’t they?” she said.

“It’s obvious to me, it’s obvious to detectives that it seems to be an area of interest that the offender focused on women and avoided the men.”

There has been no publicly released evidence so far to indicate Cauchi was involved with incel culture or had any motive against women.

Are there problems with dismissing an attacker based on their mental health?

Professor Barton says we have to be careful when talking about a perpetrator’s mental health as the cause of an attack as “most people with diagnosed mental health problems don’t go into violence”.

He says it is wrong to use colloquial language like “he was mad, it’s crazy” and then conflate it with mental health and other issues.

The Bondi Junction attacker had been diagnosed with schizophrenia at 17 years old, something authorities have noted.

“Most people with mental health issues are not violent, and mental health, if it’s appropriately dealt with, which includes medication and therapeutic management, people can be very safe. And that includes specific things like schizophrenia,” Professor Barton says.

However, he says on the other hand, “somebody, by definition, can’t go and stab strangers or anyone in the way that we saw in Bondi Junction on Saturday and be said to be mentally healthy”.

“So we need to be careful not to be reductionist and say, ‘Oh, it’s just he was mad’.”