Terry Barnes

Before dawn today, a Qantas jet touched down in Melbourne from the United States. Aboard, flying commercial first class but hardly incognito, were world-famous philanthropists and former working royals, Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The couple are in Australia for a week of ‘engagements’ in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. Even Australian monarchists who, according to opinion polls, still outnumber confirmed republicans, are unimpressed by the Sussexes’ pseudo-royal progress Unfortunately, there was none of the famously fine weather that preternaturally followed the late Queen Elizabeth in her travels. In Melbourne today the weather gods ensured the city was cold, squally and miserable.

Australia’s most decorated war hero, Ben Roberts-Smith VC, is a mountain of a man. But today, he has been cut down to size. Arriving at Sydney airport this morning on a flight from Queensland, Roberts-Smith was met by Australian Federal police officers, who escorted him to a car waiting on the tarmac. He was arrested, handcuffed and taken into custody in front of hundreds of onlookers watching from the airport terminal. If proven beyond reasonable doubt, not only he will be besmirched, but so will Australia’s SAS regiment Roberts-Smith is expected to be charged later today on five counts of the war crime of murder, arising from his tours of duty in Afghanistan as a corporal in Australia’s elite Special Air Service regiment.

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 football team asylum, and offered it to all those in the team’s party.

Australia has been global news for all the wrong reasons. So it was a relief to hear a story of a boy’s courage and heroism in south-western Australia which has won admiration from all around the world. The coastal waters of Australia are a playground. Swimming, boating, kayaking and fishing are the summer pastimes for millions of Australians. But those same waters are treacherous. Perfectly placid seas can become death traps in a minute. A recreational kayaker myself, I once almost drowned in Melbourne’s Port Philip Bay when a gale struck from nowhere, whipping up vicious, choppy waves that almost capsized me. I barely made it back to safety from just one mile offshore.

This is a summer that Australians want to forget. Australia was shocked and outraged by last month’s Bondi massacre of the innocents by Islamist fanatics. Its government and parliament have descended into angry chaos in Bondi’s wake. Massive bushfires devastated much of the states of Victoria and New South Wales this month, and a tropical cyclone brought destruction to parts of Queensland. And, on a smaller but no less frightening scale, sharks have been terrorising Australia’s east coast, and the Sydney area in particular. In less than 48 hours this week, there were four shark attacks injuring people. Two occurred off the northern Sydney beaches of Dee Why and Manly. The Dee Why victim was not seriously injured, and managed to ward off his attacker.

It breaks my heart to write this piece. Today, the resurgence of anti-Semitism that has percolated and festered in Australia for the last two years has come to a murderous, horrific climax. In a balmy early summer evening a few hours ago, Sydney’s Bondi beach was the scene of appalling carnage, At least 11 people are dead, and more than two dozen wounded, including two police officers. One of the gunmen is also now dead. Fanatics, zealots and political activists who preach or abet Jew hatred must be held to account and punished – not, as they have been, treated by the authorities with kid gloves ‘This attack was designed to target Sydney’s Jewish community on the first day of Hanukkah’, said New South Wales state premier, Chris Minns.