The muted response to the Perth bombing exposes a pattern of national indifference

A failed bomb attack in Perth on Invasion Day drew little attention from the media and public. It shows Australia has long been selective in its sense of danger.

Daniel James - Jan 29, 2026 - 5 min read

At Forrest Place in Boorloo (Perth), on what this country officially calls Australia Day, around 2,500 people gathered to mark Invasion Day. They listened to speakers, held banners and, for a few hours, took up civic space in the way protest is meant to: visibly, peacefully, together.

Then, from a balcony above, an object arced through the air and landed near the stage. Police allege it was a homemade improvised explosive device containing nails, ball bearings and chemicals, later described as a fragmentation‑style device with the potential to cause serious harm or death. It did not detonate; it landed. The crowd was evacuated. Within hours, a 31‑year‑old man was arrested and charged with offences including intent to harm and possession of explosives.

By the next morning, the story had slipped into the background hum of the news cycle. There was a brief burst of coverage, CCTV footage, a police press conference and a few quotes from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese calling for the “full force of the law”. Speaking in Darwin, he described the alleged act as shocking, said the person responsible should be dealt with harshly and urged authorities to throw the book at him, framing the response in terms of punishment and process rather than meaning or motive.

There was no statement from Sussan Ley. No lectern‑thumping outrage. No accusations that this was the prime minister’s fault. No ex-prime ministers outraged at the rise of hate directed at Aboriginal peoples. There was just mute indifference — the kind of silence that tells us something about this country in this moment. There will be no national conversation, no special envoy appointed, no urgent reckoning convened to ask how this could happen or what it reveals.

The attempted bombing was, by any reasonable reading, an act of hate, an attempt to silence a crowd and instil fear because of who they were and what they represented. Authorities have said the targets were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their allies, and that ideological motivation now forms part of what investigators are examining. A device police allege was an improvised explosive was thrown into a sea of people gathered to remember invasion and survival.

Yet the reporting spoke in the voice of bureaucracy, as if describing a traffic incident. There was no shock, no reckoning, no pause. The man’s identity was swiftly suppressed, his name withheld from public view, the story filed away, the nation’s pulse barely stirred. The absence was noted, quietly, without explanation or sustained curiosity, as if some names are easier to keep from the light than others.

Had the danger run the other way, had an Aboriginal protester been accused of violence toward a mainstream civic crowd, the country would have erupted. There would have been headlines, panels and moral campaigns about law and order. Instead, what unfolded was the quiet, practised efficiency of a media ecosystem that knows exactly how to dull its own nerves when a story threatens the country’s image of itself.

Australia has long been selective in its sense of danger. Harm from marginalised groups becomes a cultural problem; harm to them is treated as an isolated event. The Forrest Place attack didn’t fit any familiar frame. It didn’t confirm a fear that the media knows how to sell. There was no ideological packaging, no threat matrix to hang it on, so it was handled as a blip rather than a breach.

Seen clearly, this moment belongs to a larger pattern. A nation built on control prefers its violence tidy, either authorised by the state or easily condemned, while everything else is softened, proceduralised or ignored. That instinct now plays out against a steady stream of AI‑driven social media content deriding First Nations peoples, much of it amplified or encouraged by well‑resourced campaign organisations such as Advance.

This material does more than offend. It reshapes the atmosphere. It lowers the threshold of language, seeps into everyday speech and grants permission for contempt to be expressed openly and without consequence. In such conditions, violence does not erupt suddenly. It forms gradually, in a culture where dehumanisation is ordinary, outrage is selectively rationed, and silence is mistaken for calm.

It was only after sustained pressure from First Nations peoples on social media, amplified by parody headlines from satirical news sites that mocked the silence, that the issue began to cut through and attract serious attention from mainstream outlets. For First Nations peoples, that normal has always been a narrowing of space, a disciplining of story, and a management of reaction, achieved as much through omission and silence as through law.

The reflex is old, running through debates about heritage destruction, youth detention, protest laws and broadcasting alike, where order is asserted and justice is deferred. When Aboriginal peoples speak loudly, the nation tightens. When violence is directed at them, the nation shrugs. Attention remains the real currency of power. What is amplified becomes part of national meaning; what is ignored slips quietly into administrative memory.

The Forrest Place incident deserved sustained attention, not because it was sensational but because it ruptured the illusion of safety that the majority of Australia prefers to maintain. That it failed to do so tells us how the country now manages discomfort: by smoothing it into process, deferring to institutions and moving on before its implications are allowed to linger.

Authorities are now investigating the incident as a potential terrorist act, with WA Police working alongside the Australian Federal Police, ASIO and the Joint Counter Terrorism Team. Even that gravity failed to disrupt the calm. When a crowd of Aboriginal peoples can be targeted in a city square and the response remains a quiet procedural shrug, it is worth asking what kind of security we are really protecting, and for whom.

There has been no shortage of talk in this country about hate — where it resides, how it should be named, who should be disciplined for it. Some forms of speech generate days of outrage, wall-to-wall commentary and urgent demands for action. When Aboriginal peoples are targeted with an explosive device in a public square, the response barely registers. Lives are not valued on the same scale.

We can thank chance, and the incompetence of its maker, that the device did not detonate. But we should also reckon with the far more reliable force at work here: a national indifference so well-practised it no longer even needs to explain itself.