In the days following the horrific Bondi attack, the language of safety has moved quickly, and predictably. Across the country, police commissioners and politicians have assured us that expanded powers, heavier weaponry, and an increased police presence are necessary to “reassure the community.”
But reassurance is not the same thing as safety. And it’s worth asking whether what we are seeing now is about keeping communities safe, or whether the state is taking the opportunity to further expand its power, its reach, and its arsenal.
At the Adelaide Oval last week, South Australian Police were carrying rifles, exercising elevated search powers, and operating under a Declared Public Precinct for the duration of the Third Ashes Test. Every bag was being searched. Extra officers were deployed. Security Response personnel were openly carrying long-arm rifles through a space usually associated with family outings, summer evenings, and sport.
Police Commissioner Grant Stevens was explicit: there was no specific intelligence suggesting a heightened threat to South Australia. This was not a response to an imminent danger. It was, in his words, a “reassurance piece.”
The same logic was playing out in Victoria, where specialist police carrying semi-automatic rifles were patrolling outside the MCG for the Boxing Day Test. Again, we are told this was “proactive,” “precautionary,” and not based on any specific threat. The presence was deliberately overt, designed to be seen.
New South Wales, meanwhile, is considering a far more dramatic shift. The Police Commissioner has openly floated arming general duties officers with long-arm rifles, signalling a potential transformation of everyday policing into something far more militarised. This discussion, reignited in the wake of Bondi, would usher in a new era where rifles are no longer confined to specialist units but become part of routine frontline policing.
This is all happening alongside the rapid expansion of police powers: declared precincts, metal detectors, generalised drug detection, banning powers, and sweeping new anti-protest laws rushed through parliament. We are told this is about safety. We are told it is necessary. We are told there is no alternative.
But we should pause here, because something important is happening beneath this narrative.
The state is not simply responding to violence. It is using violence – or the fear of it – to reshape public space, to normalise armed authority, and to dictate what safety is supposed to look like.
And what it looks like, increasingly, is men with rifles at the cricket
There is also something deeply unsettling about how quickly a targeted act of antisemitic violence has been transformed into a broad, highly visible display of armed policing in spaces that bear no resemblance to the site or circumstances of the attack.
The Bondi attack was directed at a specific group of people, Jewish people gathered to celebrate Hanukkah. It was a racially and religiously motivated act of violence. Yet the response has not remained focused on protecting that community or confronting the specific drivers of antisemitism. Instead, it has spilled outward into everyday public life, reshaping how everyone is policed, watched, and managed.
So, we should ask: why the cricket?
There was no intelligence to suggest the Adelaide or Boxing Day Tests were unsafe. As we said, police themselves confirmed this. And yet rifles were deployed at cricket grounds, international, family-oriented, highly symbolic spaces, rather than at events that more closely resemble the circumstances of the attack.
At Bondi, police estimated around 1,000 Jewish people were present. Meanwhile, a major music festival expected to attract approximately 40,000 people is set to proceed without armed police patrolling its perimeter. On day one of the Adelaide Test, around 55,000 people attended, and were met with long-arm rifles, declared precinct powers, and intensive surveillance.
This disparity matters. It raises uncomfortable questions about how threat is being imagined, how fear is being staged, and how certain crowds are selected as the backdrop for visible displays of state power.
Cricket is not just a sporting event; it is an international ritual. Placing armed police at the cricket is not a neutral security decision, it is a political signal. It broadcasts danger into a space that was not identified as dangerous and positions the state as the only force capable of managing that manufactured fear.
This is how panic spreads, not organically, but institutionally.
When heavily armed police appear in places that feel safe, familiar, and ordinary, they do not simply reassure. They teach the public to expect danger everywhere. And once that expectation takes hold, almost any expansion of police power can be justified in its name.
In that context, do we feel safer when police carry long-arm weapons through family events? Does the sight of semi-automatic rifles near train stations, parks, and stadiums make communities feel held, or watched? Protected, or managed?
For many people, particularly those who are racialised, criminalised, surveilled, or who have long histories of harm at the hands of police, the answer is clear. Armed police do not signify safety. They signify danger, escalation, and control.
This matters because the state is not neutral in how it defines safety. Safety, as it is currently framed, is not about wellbeing, connection, or prevention. It is about force. About preparedness for violence. About being able to respond faster and harder when harm occurs, rather than addressing the conditions that allow harm to happen in the first place.
Yet we are seeing, at the same time, a very different approach to risk quietly operating elsewhere.
In Western Australia, police have charged a 39-year-old man who is accused of posting antisemitic material online, and they have seized several registered firearms from his home. His gun licence is now under review. This action occurred under Operation Dalewood, a targeted response launched after the Bondi attack, and was based on specific conduct, identifiable risk factors, and existing firearms regulation.
These cases matter because they show something important: guns can be removed without militarising public life. Threats can be addressed through intelligence-led intervention, licensing review, and enforcement of existing laws, rather than through the blanket arming of police at sporting events and the expansion of surveillance over everyone.
So, we should ask: if targeted measures are possible, why the rush toward overt militarisation? Why rifles at the cricket instead of robust gun control, hate-crime prevention, and community-based responses to extremism?
We are told that bigger weapons equal greater protection. Yet even police sources quietly acknowledge the risks. General duties officers receive minimal firearms training each year. Some within the force have warned that arming more officers with rifles would likely lead to more casualties, not fewer. The idea that expanding access to high-powered weapons automatically makes us safer is not supported by evidence, but it is repeated relentlessly.
Internationally, there is no consensus that routine rifle-carrying improves public safety. London still operates largely under “policing by consent,” with most officers unarmed. New York limits long arms to specific contexts and units. Other countries that normalise visible assault rifles in everyday policing also normalise constant surveillance, military-style control of public space, and the erosion of civil liberties.
And that erosion is already underway here.
In New South Wales, the Bondi attack has been used to justify new anti-protest laws that conflate political dissent with public danger. Civil society groups are preparing legal challenges, warning that these measures will strip people of the right to gather, speak, and organise, rights that are foundational to any meaningful democracy.
At the federal level, we are seeing accelerated gun law reforms, expanded databases, and new offences, alongside increased armed security at schools and community centres. Former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has asked publicly: How should we live with this? Why should we live with this?
It’s a powerful question. But it cuts both ways.
Why should we live in a society where public life is increasingly policed by rifles? Why should children learn that safety looks like armed guards? Why should community spaces be transformed into controlled zones governed by metal detectors, exclusion powers, and constant surveillance?
And perhaps most importantly: who benefits from this version of safety?
Because while these measures are framed as protecting “the community,” they disproportionately harm the same people they always have. Expanded police powers are never applied evenly. Declared precincts, stop-and-search powers, and visible armed policing fall hardest on Aboriginal people, migrants, people in poverty, young people, disabled people, and those already marked as suspicious by the state.
This is not incidental. It is structural.
What we are witnessing is not simply a knee-jerk response to tragedy. It is the steady normalisation of a more authoritarian model of public life, one where fear is amplified through force where targeted violence is used to justify blanket control, and where safety is something done to communities, not built with them.
Real safety does not come from more guns in more hands. It does not come from turning sporting events into quasi-military zones. And it does not come from expanding police power while shrinking democratic space.
Safety comes from addressing violence at its roots: colonialism, racism, antisemitism, misogyny, isolation, entitlement, and access to weapons, not just reacting after the fact with greater force. It comes from strong communities, meaningful social supports, and responses that do not rely on intimidation as reassurance.
When the state tells us that rifles at the cricket are what safety looks like, we should be brave enough to say: No, that is not safety. That is power, flexing in plain sight. Flexing that still leaves questions about its ability to actually stop a mass tragedy.
Our rights are being eroded and the police powers increasing under the guise of publc protection . Police are not trained in the use of semi automatic weapons , random searches in city areas will target specific groups and our most vulnerable. Abuse of police powers is already rampant and leading to abuse of power These changes are a recipe for disaster as are the knee jerk reaction to gun laws .