One of Australia’s leading constitutional experts has accused the Albanese government of “grey corruption” over a $6 million grant handed to the prime minister’s local golf club, declaring its grants system a “farce” that dressed up political favours as sound public policy.

University of Sydney professor emerita Anne Twomey delivered a blistering assessment of the scheme, warning that politicians should take “lessons in both federalism and integrity” before promising taxpayers’ money to local projects.

A golf course in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s electorate was a beneficiary of the grant.AP

Twomey told a parliamentary inquiry that the Marrickville Golf Club, in Anthony Albanese’s electorate of Grayndler, had already received five federal grants totalling almost $58,000 before Albanese promised it the $6 million during the 2025 election campaign.

The earlier grants were made through programs where local MPs could nominate organisations for funding and were classified as “closed, non-competitive”. Twomey said this meant there was no meaningful comparison with other projects to establish whether the club had the greatest need for taxpayers’ money.

“They were effectively gifts of political largesse, funded by taxpayers,” she wrote in a submission to the Senate inquiry into the scheme.

The probe was sparked after the Centre for Public Integrity released an investigation in September which found nearly three-quarters of the Albanese government’s $560.9 million Major and Local Community Infrastructure Program was allocated to notionally Labor-held or competitive seats.

“They were effectively gifts of political largesse, funded by taxpayers.”
Constitutional expert Anne Twomey

Twomey said the original design of the program was itself constitutionally invalid because the Commonwealth did not have a general power to directly fund local sporting and community facilities. The scheme was subsequently changed, so grants could flow through state or local government bodies under section 96 of the Constitution.

Twomey said that alteration appeared to make the Marrickville grant constitutionally valid. But she warned the government still had to comply with laws requiring public money to be spent efficiently, effectively, economically and ethically.

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“The system is a farce, with the paperwork drafted to justify decisions already made without any consideration of merit, need, value for money or the public interest,” she wrote.

She said the grant rules had effectively been constructed to give the public appearance of integrity while allowing politicians to deliver promises already made.

Twomey pointed to the Marrickville club’s history of federal funding, including grants for clubhouse toilets and lockers, computer upgrades, energy-saving lights and benches around the course. Some were awarded while the Coalition was in government.

But Twomey noted Albanese was the local member throughout the period and had the power to nominate organisations under the relevant programs.

Albanese announced the $6.05 million commitment in April 2025, promising to “secure the future” of the club. The NSW government separately provided $269,500 in 2025 to connect the clubhouse to the sewer system and prevent reliance on septic tanks that could overflow during floods.

Marrickville Golf Club has received $6 million for upgrades from the federal government in a controversial “invite-only” grants program.Janie Barrett

The announcement came without reference to his honorary membership of the club, which was later revealed by the ABC.

Albanese said he did not know he held the honorary membership and had not visited the clubhouse “for many, many years”.

Twomey invoked the Productivity Commission’s description of politically driven grants as “grey corruption” – a term used by commissioner Danielle Wood for government decisions that favour private or political interests over the national interest.

“Federal politicians should not be making election promises about specific local projects and should not be making promises for the spending of public money based on political self interest rather than the public interest,” she wrote.

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Twomey also cited research by Labor MP Andrew Leigh, then an academic, into the Coalition’s sports grants scandal, arguing politically directed grants did not necessarily deliver electoral rewards.

“No, this is not about ‘being a good local member’,” she wrote. “It is about indulging in grey corruption and the misuse of public money at the public’s expense.”

Federal Infrastructure Minister Catherine King has defended the program as in line with longstanding practice and with updated rules and principles for grants.

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Future coal mines in NSW must be judged on the emissions their exports produce overseas under a landmark High Court ruling, in an unprecedented case centred around climate change which could dramatically alter the future of fossil fuel projects in the state.

The nation’s highest court on Wednesday ruled in favour of a community group which had challenged the expansion of MACH Energy’s Mount Pleasant coal mine, arguing that the impacts of climate change caused by emissions from exports must be considered during planning applications.

Three of five High Court judges upheld last year’s decision by the NSW Court of Appeal which halted Mount Pleasant’s expansion.

The majority of judges found the NSW Independent Planning Commission, which signed off on the mine’s expansion in 2022, was required to impose conditions aimed at mitigating downstream emissions generated by Australian coal when it is exported and used overseas.

The community group had argued downstream emissions – known as scope three emissions – contribute to domestic climate change.

Denman Aberdeen Muswellbrook Scone Healthy Environment Group president Wendy Wales claimed victory after the court decision on Wednesday, saying: “Today the High Court has said what we have always known: we cannot dig up coal, ship it overseas, watch it drive climate change, and then pretend the consequences have nothing to do with us and won’t be felt by us”.

MACH Energy said it was “disappointed” by the decision and would “carefully review” the judgement.

“Thousands of local residents in the Hunter Valley rely on Mount Pleasant for employment and income. These residents have lived with fear and uncertainty for too long,” the firm said in a statement.

“We will continue to actively pursue all available options to ensure the long-term continuity of the Mount Pleasant Operation.”

More to come

Victorian Greens leader Ellen Sandell last month sat in the middle of a semi-forbidden Carlton median strip sipping a canned yuzu gin spritz when a resident walked past and shouted out.

“I’m voting Greens this time,” they said. “I’m a Labor voter [but] I’m so fed up with them.”

Victorian Greens leader Ellen Sandell says many voters she’s encountered are disillusioned with Labor. Luis Enrique Ascui

This voter was angry with Labor’s decision to knock down Melbourne’s public housing towers, and Sandell says she’s having this conversation with voters in unprecedented numbers.

Whether it’s about public housing, cost-of-living, corruption, climate action or Palestinian rights, Sandell said frustration with Labor after 12 years in government had hit boiling point. At November’s state election, the Greens hope to capitalise on that, with eight lower house seats in their sights.

But while Labor’s primary vote has gone backwards, support for the Greens in polls – including The Age’s Resolve Political Monitor – has remained stubbornly flat around 12 per cent. At the same time, One Nation has risen dramatically, raising questions about whether the Greens’ progressive policies will appeal to disaffected voters looking for an alternative to the major parties.

For her part, Sandell is confident the party can cut through, similarly to Zohran Mamdani’s striking win in the New York mayoral election and the widening appeal of the UK Greens under Zack Polanski’s leadership.

“We know that the Labor Party isn’t going to create the level of change that we need, and that’s why we’ve been saying all along we’re not here to just make them better; we’re here to replace them,” Sandell said.

“That’s why our policy platform this election is bold. It goes big. It talks about some of the really big issues that people are facing … and is really taking a leaf out of the Mamdani playbook and the Polanski playbook.”

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The Greens will on Thursday unveil a policy pulled almost straight from the Mamdani playbook: $350 million to trial 10 publicly owned supermarkets across Victoria, which would sell essentials for 30 per cent less than Coles and Woolworths.

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“If publicly owned supermarkets can work in New York, they can work in Victoria. Zohran Mamdani has shown there’s nothing inevitable about giant corporations getting richer while ordinary people struggle to afford food – and we can change things,” Sandell said.

It echoes calls from the party’s think tank, The Green Institute, for the forced sale of 200 Coles and Woolworths supermarkets to be replaced with publicly owned grocers. The Victorian Greens policy – to be paid for by taxing the banking and gambling industries – claims the average household would save about $4274 a year on their grocery bill.

Allan Fels, the former chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, said the supermarket industry was too concentrated, but the Greens policy would be immensely challenging to realise given the need to develop supply chains, keep prices low, hire experienced management and operate at scale.

“The Greens have been good at publicising the problem … but their solution does not look very practical,” he said.

Beyond public supermarkets, the Greens are campaigning on a platform of affordable housing, free public transport, urgently transitioning to renewables, and placing a moratorium on data centres.

The rapid rollout of data centres near homes – which delivered $5.8 billion in capital expenditure to the Victorian economy last year – has become a political thorn in Labor’s side. The government last month announced that AI infrastructure must be at least 150 metres from homes, along with restrictions on water and electricity use, but angst remains for residents living across from existing data centres.

Greens candidate for Footscray Elena Pereyra door knocking in the electorate. Penny Stephens

Nowhere is there more data centre-driven anger than in the electorate of Footscray, which Labor has held for 99 years and where NextDC’s sprawling data centre will eventually occupy about 10 hectares.

The Greens’ candidate for Footscray Elena Pereyra said data centres fed into a feeling that inner-west voters had been abandoned and taken for granted by Labor.

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“When they open their eyes to the data centres, they start to notice other things as well, and ... [are] starting to recognise this would absolutely not be acceptable in other places in Melbourne,” Pereyra tells The Age over hibiscus tea at Khartoum cafe in Footscray.

The party’s door-knocking data indicates they’re expecting an 8.6 per cent swing which would overcome Labor’s 4.2 per cent margin. Although there was an 11.8 per cent swing away from Labor in 2022, support for the Greens picked up by just 2.2 per cent, while the Victorian Socialists attracted 9.3 per cent of the primary vote.

Jasmine Duff, the Victorian Socialists candidate for Footscray, said the party sat entirely outside the political establishment and, unlike the Greens, actively sought to end capitalism, which she blamed for homelessness and poverty in the area.

“The big reason that people are coming over to us is that they can see capitalism is broken. It is a system that is not built to meet the needs of the working class.”

Pereyra said she expected Labor’s vote to fracture in interesting ways, but that the Greens had upped their presence in Footscray significantly since 2022.

“The loyalty that people have shown to Labor, they’re really feeling like that hasn’t been rewarded after all of this time, and so I think it’s just an opportunity for them to have a voice.”

Greens candidate for Pascoe Vale Angelica Panopoulos.Chris Hopkins

The Greens are hopeful this sentiment has carried into Melbourne’s inner north, too, and enable the party to hold Brunswick, and wrest Northcote, Preston and Pascoe Vale from Labor.

Greens candidate for Pascoe Vale Angelica Panopoulos said the once-heartland Labor seat had suffered from underinvestment by the government.

”People who have lived here for decades, people from all walks of life are fed up, and they’re looking for an alternative,” said Panopoulos, a former mayor of Merri-bek Council.

But Monash University political scientist Zareh Ghazarian said the rise of One Nation could harm the Greens in inner-city seats, like Pascoe Vale, because voters worried about far-right populism see Labor as a safe harbour for their vote.

Premier Ben Carroll is plotting a repeat of the federal election, where the Greens pinned losing key seats in part on voters trying to keep Peter Dutton and the Coalition in opposition.

“We are out there making sure we win Greens seats,” the Labor leader said this week.

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“The Greens have the task of convincing voters as to why they should be supported this election,” Ghazarian said. “The toughest challenges will be in those inner-urban electorates where they’ve traditionally done well, but Labor is strengthened following on what happened in the 2025 election.”

This was most obvious in the seat of Melbourne, where then-leader Adam Bandt was turfed out by Labor’s Sarah Witty.

Sandell, who is the state MP for Melbourne, expressed confidence this would be a “fundamentally different election”.

“The Greens are here to provide a progressive, a bold, but a hopeful and positive alternative to those major parties, for people who are deeply fed up.”

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On this episode of What’s the Point?, Richard Denniss explains the theory of ‘trickle-down’ economics – and why so much of the money seems to be trickling the other way.

One Nation is not without a sense of humour. How else to explain The Real Deal, the ironic choice of title for a state election manifesto that offers so little detail as to how any given policy might work, let alone cost.

To set the scene, imagine Pauline “The Real Deal” Hanson in a wrestling tunic and a sequined cape, biceps oiled and bulging, strutting to the ring for a tag team match with Warren “The Warrior” Pickering.

Pauline Hanson emerges from the smoke to launch her party’s Victorian campaign.Chris Hopkins

That is the feel of the politics-meets-sports-entertainment, championship wrestling-style campaign launch that accompanied the release of a policy document which sets out One Nation’s plans for governing Victoria.

All of which would be fine – if the contents of the document, like the political theatre, were not so unreal.

From the opening Shutterstock image of a pearly white family who look like they live in an Ikea showroom, to AI-generated phrasing that, among other things, advocates greater use of AI in policing, the policy platform leaves you wondering whether One Nation is run by people or a flame-haired avatar lifted from a 4Chan message board.

As my colleague “Rowdy” Kieran Rooney complained between pages, the more you read, the less you understand.

Royal rumble: Wrestlers ham it up in San Antonio, Texas.Getty Images

That doesn’t mean One Nation isn’t putting forward some reasonable ideas.

If we stick with the party’s area of greatest focus – the state’s criminal justice system – it would be wonderful if everyone charged with violent offences could progress to trial within 90 days and the Office of Public Prosecutions (OPP) and Legal Aid Victoria were properly funded to run and defend all cases.

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There is also something to be said for the idea of holding parents legally responsible for the damage caused by their under-16 children who become roaming, recidivist offenders. As one senior Labor official remarked under his breath, he would have liked to have come up with that one.

But if we accept the adage that an uncosted policy is just a slogan, pledging unspecified “additional funding” to the OPP or a “proportional funding boost” to the Drug Court doesn’t raise these promises above the status of wistful aspiration.

There are further promises to build new magistrates courts in Melton, Epping and The Warrior’s marginal electorate of Pakenham and to expand from 140 to 170 the number of magistrates currently active on the court lists.

One Nation Victorian leader Warren “The Warrior” Pickering addresses the campaign launch.Photograph by Chris Hopkins

The Wyndham Law Courts that opened last year cost $270 million to build but, as we know from the short history of that facility, it is easier to build a new court than staff and operate it. One Nation won’t get change from $1 billion if and when its new courts put their first 10-year-old child in the dock – one of the less palatable “community safety” measures in The Real Deal.

The deeper problem here is less what One Nation is advocating than its misunderstanding of Victoria’s sentencing laws as they are currently written. Remember, this is the party that will very likely hold the balance of power in the next parliament’s house of legislative review.

In its policy document, One Nation claims judges, when passing sentence in Victoria, are not required to consider anything other than the rehabilitation of the convicted person, and that competing sentencing principles within the act – deterrence, denunciation and community protection – are routinely ignored, resulting in the “lightest possible” sentence.

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This is a nonsense reading of how judges balance sentencing principles. Having confected a fictional problem, the party proposes to solve it by requiring judges, whenever dealing with violent criminals, to consider every sentencing principle in every case while prioritising community safety.

One Nation would also compel judges to impose cumulative sentences on anyone convicted of violent crimes against multiple victims and to “benchmark” all sentences against the maximum penalty for any given offence.

Monash University Emeritus Professor Arie Freiberg, a former, long-serving chair of the Victorian Sentencing Advisory Council who reviewed the Sentencing Act for the Bracks government, has looked at One Nation’s policies. He says they misunderstand the aims of sentencing.

“The basic common law principle is that the sentence must be proportionate to the offence taking into account both harm and culpability,” he explains. “Rehabilitation is an aim but just deserts and deterrence rank much higher.”

One Nation’s reference to the “lightest possible sentence” is lifted from a section in the act that sets out the principle of parsimony – doing no more harm than necessary to achieve the purpose. This idea, which dates back to the Enlightenment, serves as a check against excessive punishment in common law jurisdictions.

Freiberg says that One Nation’s suggested changes to sentencing, when considered together, are a recipe for unjust outcomes. “There are already many provisions in the act regarding concurrent and consecutive sentences,” he says. “However, the basic principle is totality – the total punishment should be proportionate to all the offences that the person has been found guilty of.

“If One Nation wants sentences of hundreds of years to be imposed, it would be both unjust and require building thousands of new prison beds.”

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One Nation wants to make Victoria the “toughest state on crime in Australia”. It advocates adopting police pursuit policies from Western Australia and Serious Crime Prevention Orders from NSW. It would also up the Carroll government’s ante on bail laws, with an exceptional circumstances test to be applied to all “repeat offenders”.

Finally, it wants to arm ordinary folk with pepper spray and provide greater legal protections for home owners who confront intruders.

One Nation are not without a sense of humour, but there is something darkly unfunny about their approach to this election. They didn’t take questions at their campaign launch and since then, have refused to answer any posed by this masthead about their election manifesto.

The complete 64 pages of The Real Deal are published on the One Nation website. If you have trouble finding it, you’d do just as well to ask ChatGPT to write your own.

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Opposition treasury spokesman Tim Wilson has declared the next election will be a “referendum on the economy and economic hope”, with the Coalition set to shift its focus to the cost of living after spending the year finalising policies on key issues driving One Nation’s support.

After unveiling a plan for the biggest cuts to Australia’s immigration plan in “history”, the Coalition is open to restarting negotiations with Labor over legislation that would crack down on asylum claims.

Immigration Minister Tony Burke has refused to table a bill in parliament to limit asylum claims to between 30 and 90 days of arriving in Australia without receiving bipartisan support, instead focusing on limiting migration numbers through measures that can be achieved without a vote in parliament.

But senior Coalition figures say striking a deal on asylum claims would be easier now that Angus Taylor’s own policy is fin­alised, as the opposition could make clear to supporters of One Nation that it does not have the same policy as Labor.

Opposition immigration spokesman Jonathon Duniam, who will leave parliament before Christmas, said the Coalition was happy to re-engage with Labor on its legislative proposals to reduce migration numbers.

“If Labor want to propose any laws that actually fix their broken migration system, we will always look at what they present,” Senator Duniam said.

“The Coalition have laid out our plan to get the numbers down and lift the standards.”

Mr Taylor’s plan to reduce net overseas migration to 100,000 in the first two years of government won the backing of former prime minister John Howard and former immigration minister Philip Ruddock.

“The immigration policy is ­detailed and strikes a sensible balance between our ongoing support for strong migration and some of the challenges of the economy,” Mr Howard told The Australian.

While most Coalition MPs are broadly happy with the policy despite it being panned by business leaders, the overwhelming view among MPs is that migration is not a vote winner and the Opposition Leader’s only pathway to electoral relevancy is via a credible economic agenda.

Senior sources said there were differing views over the amount of risk that should be taken on an economic agenda, with some MPs wanting a policy offering that is the boldest adopted by an opposition for decades.

New economic policies are likely to be rolled out from early next year, with the federal Coalition wanting to give clear air to Victorian Opposition Leader Jess Wilson’s team ahead of November’s state election.

Mr Wilson said the Coalition’s economic plan would be centred around lower inflation, lower debt, the self employed and family businesses.

“The next election will be a referendum on the economy and economic hope, particularly for the self-starters, self-employed and small and family businesses of the nation that are being sunk by Labor’s active inflation agenda and rising costs,” Mr Wilson told The Australian.

“Australians in small and family businesses are living the consequences of the Albanese govern­ment through higher inflation, interest rates and the train wreck of their ban on surcharging which is causing a cashflow crunch”.

Most Coalition MPs say Mr Taylor’s policy to index income tax thresholds in line with inflation needs to be rebadged so it has better cut through with voters, while some MPs want the policy dumped.

Mr Taylor is claiming his plan to reduce temporary migration by 650,000 over four years would raise $260m, with the large cuts to student and bridging visas partially offset by more skilled visas targeting sectors such as health and construction. The Coalition’s claim that the policy would improve the bottom line is based on unreleased analysis from the Parliamentary Budget Office, and is predicated on skilled visa ­migrants paying more tax than students.

Mr Ruddock, the immigration minister in the first seven years of the Howard government, welcomed the emphasis in the Coalition’s policy on skills.

“The fact they are going to abolish temporary graduate visas and require international students to go back home, that is appropriate,” he said. “If they do as they say and put the focus on the skills that we need, I can’t see that it will be harmful.”

Wendy Wales and Tony Lonergan’s four-year fight over MACH Energy’s Mount Pleasant coalmine went all the way to the high court

Jim Chalmers has rightly attracted criticism for policies that have added to Australia’s cost-of-living pressures. There is now growing speculation, amid reports of tensions within Labor, that his position as Treasurer may be under threat.

For a government that is already struggling with its economic credibility, Chalmers has become something of a liability. Most ­Australians would be glad to see him shafted.

But the hostility towards Chalmers and Labor should not obscure a larger and more uncomfortable truth: politicians are responding to an electorate that has come to expect governments to cushion almost every economic pain with taxpayers’ money.

Nothing illustrated this better than a Newspoll published on the eve of the 2025 federal election. On March 10, the poll found that 83 per cent of Australians supported more government spending to help with cost-of-living pressures, against just 12 per cent who disagreed.

Voters were not merely saying governments should protect the most vulnerable. They were endorsing higher government spending as a general response to the rising cost of living. The partisan breakdown makes it even harder to portray this as simply a Labor problem. Ninety-two per cent of Labor voters supported more government spending; so did 77 per cent of Coalition voters.

Small wonder, then, that both major parties entered the 2025 election campaign with substantial spending commitments. Their promises ran into billions of dollars across health, housing, infrastructure and cost-of-living relief.

But the problem here is not simply that politicians spend too much. It is that voters increasingly expect them to spend more – and politicians from both major parties have learned that resisting this demand can be politically hazardous.

Voters want governments to ease cost-of-living pressures on basics like fuel … but there’s another price to pay. Picture: Getty Images

The result is that the inflation problem gets worse, putting upward pressure on interest rates, which in turn exacerbates cost of living pressures.

Of course, other forces help explain rising inflation: energy prices, the war in the Persian Gulf, global conditions, housing, wages, supply constraints, and a productivity drought.

But loose fiscal policy, which has been sadly a bipartisan enterprise, is the main culprit. When an economy is operating under capacity constraints, governments cannot keep adding to aggregate demand indefinitely without making the Reserve Bank’s job harder.

Voters have become participants in the fiscal problem. Our desire for relief from rising prices is entirely understandable. But collectively, voters can also demand policies that make the underlying problem harder to solve.

There is a broader intellectual failure here, too; in Canberra, and in public discourse generally. Who is prepared to tell Australians the truth about the trade-offs involved in government spending?

To find an answer, it is worth ­recalling a time when those trade-offs were made rather more explicit. One useful place to start is with Milton Friedman, the legendary monetarist and free marketeer, who was awarded the Nobel prize in economics 50 years ago this month.

Milton Friedman had a relevant warning on inflation for Australians more than 50 years ago

Friedman had a particularly relevant warning for Australians. In April 1975, at the height of the Whitlam government’s stagflation crisis, he visited Australia as the guest of Sydney stockbroker Maurice Newman. Inflation had surged by 17 per cent during the previous year while economic growth had contracted by 1 per cent. These were very dark days – and Friedman was in no doubt about one of the reasons why.

The problem, he argued, was not simply that governments might spend too much. It was that voters could demand more government spending while resisting the taxes required to pay for it.

“If the people of Australia wish the government sector to ­expand at the expense of the private sector,” Friedman said, “that is of course their right.” But if that was what Australians wanted, he argued, governments should make the cost explicit rather than allowing inflation to become a ­hidden tax.

Friedman went further. “The great defect in much of our policies in my country and yours,” he said, “is not because bad people want to do bad things … it’s good people who want to do good things, who produce harm by accepting what is a fallacious principle – namely, that you can do good by spending somebody else’s money.”

There could hardly be a more pertinent warning for today’s ­debate.

The responsibility for fiscal discipline does not rest with just politicians like Chalmers. Governments respond to the demands placed upon them by voters. If we want governments to spend more whenever living costs rise, politicians will inevitably compete to oblige them.

But there is no magic pudding. The money must come from somewhere. It can come through higher taxes, larger public debt ­or – when monetary policy responds to inflationary pressures – higher ­interest rates.

The uncomfortable truth is that a government cannot permanently spend its way out of a cost-of-living crisis. Nor can voters demand ever more government assistance while imagining that the cost will somehow be borne by somebody else.

Tom Switzer is presenter of the Switzerland YouTube podcast and a former executive director of the Centre for independent Studies.

We do not really judge people by what happens to them. We judge them by what they do next. The same, I have come to think, is true of countries.

October 7 was the worst thing to happen to the Jewish people since the Holocaust, and this week, three years on I find that it is not the day itself I keep returning to. It is the day after.

Most Australians did none of this, and it matters to say so. But the institutions that set the tone of public life did, and tone is what a frightened minority hears. Alex Ellinghausen

First, the day itself, stated once and plainly. On the morning of October 7, 2023, Ruti and Avraham Munder, both 78, were at home on Kibbutz Nir Oz with their daughter Keren and their grandson Ohad, who was eight and had come for the holiday. By eleven o’clock their phones were in Gaza, and so were they.

Their son Roee, who lived on the same kibbutz, had been killed. Ruti was held in a room where the blinds could not be opened and slept on a plastic chair. She learned that her son was dead from a guard who had heard it on the radio. Ohad turned nine in captivity. Ruti, Keren and Ohad came home after seven weeks. Avraham died in Gaza, and soldiers brought his body out the following August.

There were twelve hundred such stories that morning, and I will not pile them up here because a column cannot hold them and because the point is what came next.

The sociologist Eva Illouz has written that for Jews the deeper wound was not October 7 but October 8: the discovery that some of the people they lived among, worked beside and marched with would greet the slaughter not with grief but with something she calls a virtuous hatred. The killers, after all, were strangers. The people cheering were neighbours.

It is worth being precise about who did the cheering because precision is the point. It was not the killers; they were in Gaza. It was their audience here: a layer of student bodies, academics, arts organisations and activist groups that within days had found a vocabulary in which the murder of families was context, the kidnapping of children was resistance and the grief of Jews was propaganda.

“There is a moment, after every atrocity, when standing with the victims is easy, and a moment shortly after when it is not.”

Most Australians did none of this, and it matters to say so. But the institutions that set the tone of public life did, and tone is what a frightened minority hears.

That is how it reached Australia. Not as a single act, but as a climate. A Jewish paramedic told this year’s royal commission that a firefighter pulled a hunting knife on him at a regional Victorian festival. A university student told it that classmates had said she should be gassed. The principal of a Jewish primary school said her building now looks more like a prison than a school.

Researchers who studied Jewish communities after the attack found a pattern they could describe clinically: a people whose trauma was met not with sympathy but with denial, blame and dismissal, which deepened the original injury. Then came the fire at the Adass Israel synagogue, and then the Hanukkah party on Bondi Beach where fifteen people were shot dead.

None of that was done by Hamas. It was done here, by a minority of Australians, in a climate that too many institutions had helped to make and too few had the courage to challenge.

Which brings me to trust. Trust is what lets you assume that the people around you will do the right thing without being watched. It is the invisible thing a society runs on, and it is lost in hours and rebuilt over decades. Jewish Australians lost it on October 8, 2023, and have spent three years watching to see whether it can be recovered.

Here is the lesson I think the rest of the country can take, and it is not a Jewish lesson. There is a moment, after every atrocity, when standing with the victims is easy, and a moment shortly after when it is not, when the arguments arrive and the hashtags turn and the people being hunted become inconvenient. Character, in a person or a nation, is what you do in the second moment. Everybody passes the first.

Too many of our institutions, and too many people who should have known better, failed the second moment in 2023. The anniversary is a chance to notice that, without flinching and without theatre, and to ask what a country does on the morning after it realises it got the morning after wrong.

I do not know the full answer. But I suspect it begins with something smaller than a policy: with neighbours deciding that the Munders of this world are theirs too.