Every so often, a country reaches a point where attention tilts away from the tragedy itself and lands squarely on the person who must lead it through the aftermath.
The headlines grow louder by the day, the pressure builds rather than settles, and one question cuts through the noise with increasing force: How will they respond?
What follows isn’t bureaucracy or box-ticking. It’s a test of steadiness. It’s about nerve.
It’s a measure of whether the person in charge can meet a moment that demands more than caution, more than instinct, more than political muscle memory.
It’s about whether they can rise to meet a moment that is larger than their instincts, their advisers, or the easy political calculation.
And Australia is squarely inside one of those moments now.
Weeks after the Bondi massacre, the country is waiting for something else: a decision.
A call that only one person can make.
This isn’t really about a federal royal commission only.
It’s about a Prime Minister standing in the kind of moment that every leader eventually faces, the moment that exposes the difference between managing and leading.
Trust is the quiet engine that lets a society function. Lose that, and everything else begins to wobble.
Great leaders, the ones we quote decades later, had a habit of recognising when history had tapped them on the shoulder.
F.W. de Klerk knew what it meant to tear down the very system that had lifted him. He could have stalled, deflected, protected his own base. Instead, he dismantled apartheid South Africa knowing it might cost him everything. Courage is rarely convenient. He showed it anyway.
Abraham Lincoln led a nation broken in half. Ending slavery was dangerous, divisive, and could have cost him the war. But he knew leadership sometimes means stepping into the fire, not waiting for safer days.
Nelson Mandela understood it the first time he stood outside a prison gate, blinking in the sunlight, knowing he had to guide a wounded nation toward a gentler horizon.
He built a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that forced South Africa to face its wounds. He knew countries don’t heal by hiding pain, but by confronting it.
Franklin Roosevelt took power in a moment when faith itself felt exhausted. He didn’t run from the crisis — he walked straight into it, reshaped the country’s institutions piece by piece, and told a shaken nation that fear would not decide its future.
Julia Gillard launched the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse — one of the bravest and most far-reaching inquiries Australia has ever seen.
She faced pressure not to do it. Some of the most powerful institutions in the country preferred the past to stay buried. But she chose daylight. She chose survivors. She chose truth over comfort.
They all encountered a point where hesitation and boldness demanded entirely different versions of them. And each time, they stepped forward rather than sideways.
Australia has reached that kind of point now.
There is an undeniable pattern unfolding across the country.
The families of the Bondi victims have spoken with a rawness that still echoes. Senior figures in business, law, education, medicine, and faith communities have added their weight.
More than sixty of Australia’s most admired athletes — people who know something about pressure, about performing when the world is watching — have put their names on a call for a national inquiry.
This isn’t a whisper. It isn’t splintered into factions. It is a steady drumbeat from across the nation, carrying one message: find out why this happened, and make sure it never happens again.
In an age where people argue about everything from weather apps to traffic cones, this is close to a miracle. A rare moment when Australians, in all their diversity, are leaning in the same direction. That alone should command attention.
The question now is whether the Prime Minister sees this chorus for what it is — a turning point waiting for him.
Leadership doesn’t only live in grand speeches. Sometimes it shows up in the willingness to walk into uncomfortable territory.
A royal commission will dig. It will ask hard questions. It will drag imperfect decisions into the light. It will demand candour from agencies unused to public scrutiny. It will require patience, humility, and stamina.
But standing back from it carries its own cost. When a community has been traumatised, the absence of decisive action doesn’t look like caution. It looks like distance.
And distance never heals anything.
Trust is the quiet engine that lets a society function. Lose that, and everything else begins to wobble.
Robodebt was rightly given a royal commission. It revealed negligence, cruelty, and political failure. So why is Bondi — an act of terror that tore into the heart of the country — treated differently?
Is it because Robodebt examined the last government’s failures, while Bondi may expose failures on this government’s watch?
A national inquiry isn’t a punishment. It’s a way for a country to steady itself, to look its hardest truths in the eye, to rebuild confidence in the institutions designed to protect us.
If you listen closely, you can already hear the outline of the story Australia will tell itself years from now.
A chapter about a country shaken to its core, searching for direction.
A chapter about communities waiting, uncertain whether their leaders understood the weight they carried.
And somewhere in that chapter, a paragraph about the Prime Minister who realised that saying yes to a transparent, fearless investigation wasn’t a concession. It was a declaration of strength.
Moments like this don’t come often. They don’t wait long. And once they pass, they don’t return.
Australia has placed a question in front of its leader. The country has done its part. Now we wait to see if he does his.
Dvir Abramovich is chairman of The Anti-Defamation Commission
https://thewest.com.au/opinion/dvir-abramovich-prime-minister-must-show-courage-on-royal-commission-if-nation-is-to-heal-after-bondi-terror-c-21214693
