Australia

Picture the scene. You have bravely battled onto the set of MasterChef Australia, hoping that your strawberry pavlova or similar hero dish is going to be the one that sends the judges into gasps of culinary ecstasy. Then the producers and host smile conspiratorially at you and reveal that the stakes (as opposed to steaks) have been raised. There will be a guest judge, they tell you, a figure who is “a global icon, a philanthropist, a humanitarian, a woman known around the world for her heart, her voice and her deep love for home cooking”. You draw a deep breath. Who on earth is this multi-faceted hyphenate, you wonder, an all-in-one combination of saint, queen and legend?

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is someone who wants to be liked even more than respected. He wants to be seen by Australians as one of them, a "bloke’s bloke," one of the lads. In politician-speak, authentic. Australia is different these days: it’s now a woman’s world, and an increasingly puritan and humorless society, in which many voters would not even have understood Osborne and Albanese’s humor, let alone appreciated it That’s the only explanation for Albanese choosing to invite a ribald Australian podcaster, Nikki Osborne, to his official residence for a boisterous sit-down chat that has gone globally viral, for all the wrong reasons.

Australians are known for world-class performances in many fields. Mostly, our achievements are a source of national pride, but one field of achievement causes us only horror and shame. Our serial killers are some of the most prolific and brutal anywhere. And none are more brutal or prolific than the late, unlamented, Ivan Robert Marko Milat. Milat took his victims into the forest bound, terrified and subjected them to unspeakably sadistic torture The facts of Milat’s known killing spree are gruesome and horrific. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Milat turned the Belanglo State Forest, a bushland reserve off the main highway to Melbourne, and 80 miles from Sydney, into his personal killing field.

In 1989, as tanks rolled into central Beijing to crush the pro-democracy protest in Tiananmen Square, Australia’s then prime minister, Bob Hawke, spontaneously offered asylum to all Chinese citizens who happened to be in Australia. Thousands took up his offer and made lasting contributions to the country that gave them shelter. Last Tuesday, the women showed personal courage by taking a silent but very public stand against a regime that stops at nothing to punish open disloyalty On Tuesday, Hawke’s successor, Anthony Albanese, granted five women of Iran’s national soccer team asylum, and offered it to all those in the team’s party.

The Bondi murders painted a picture constituted out of the contrast between shade and light. This was the chiaroscuro massacre. But, perhaps because we have become desensitized by endless dark descriptions of mass killings over the years, our attention was as much on the moments of brightness on that Sydney beach: the onlookers who grappled with the shooters, the lifeguards who sprinted towards danger, those who shielded strangers with their own bodies. These acts of heroism seemed all the more remarkable because of all we have been led to believe about how people act in emergencies.This can be summarized in one word: panic. When the going gets tough, ordinary people fall apart.

After four days of looking like a rabbit in the headlights, embattled Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, finally started to act like a national leader willing to do what’s right. Yesterday, Labor's Albanese announced his government’s response to a plan to combat anti-Semitism proposed by his hand-picked special envoy on anti-Semitism, Jewish community leader Jillian Segal. Albanese has had Segal’s report since July. His response yesterday, which effectively accepted the envoy’s 13 recommendations, was tardy but substantial.

It’s been three days since the jihad against innocent Jews at Sydney’s Bondi beach. A nation’s grief is swiftly turning to anger and Australia’s prime minister is floundering. As more is learned about the father-and-son killers who took 15 lives and wounded many more, questions are piling up. How did the father enter the country? How did security agencies lose track of the son, who not only imbibed his father’s Jew hate, but may have been further radicalized by reportedly studying with one of Sydney’s most notorious Islamist hate preachers? How did they manage to go to a militant area of the Philippines as recently as a month ago? How did the father manage to hold a gun license, given his own history and that of his son?