After Bondi, our leaders needed to draw breath. Now, so do we all

Some years ago, a friend began referring to the period between Christmas and New Year’s Day as “the interregnum”: a pause between two things. To me, those days are a pause in the flow of time itself. Before Christmas, time flows normally. After New Year’s Day, it begins to approach its normal speed again. In the week between, time passes at a different pace, possesses a different quality. It is a reminder that time does not have to flow at the precise pace it usually seems to.

Right now, time feels particularly distorted. Much of the country has slowed down, as usual. This year, some of that is tied to mourning; grief, it is said, slows time down horribly. But the political and media classes have, if anything, sped up since the murders on December 14.

There are several news cycles a day, as debates ping back and forth. Responsibility for this rapid back-and-forth is not shared equally; the Coalition and its allies have caused much of it, by immediately turning to political attack. Was this where discussion needed to turn, so soon? Even if you believe the criticisms of Labor legitimate, what was gained by making them so quickly?

At the time, it must have seemed at least possible that such interventions would help establish a narrative it would be difficult for the government to shift. By now, that is less clear. My own suspicion is that for many Australians those early, loud attacks weakened any case that might be made against Labor. They came across as overly political, at the most inappropriate of times – opportunistic and ugly.

This is the political cost of haste – which points to something more important. After a horrific event, emotions run high – not just among those directly affected. The atmosphere can turn feverish. But this is when the political class, including the opposition, should lead. They have seen crises before. They know – or should know – that the stakes are more than political. One of their duties, on our behalf, is to look through the immediate period to its other side, when initial feelings will have faded.

Perhaps the government thought it was doing this, when it opposed calls for a royal commission. It likely felt it was quite sensibly resisting hysterical political calls from its opponents, who had already made clear their determination to damage Labor. But the government was wrong; it was, in fact, making its own mistake of haste in responding so defensively. It did not merely defer the question, saying it could be answered later. It argued strongly against the idea.

And perhaps the opposition thought it was helping those in the Jewish community who wanted a commission, by taking their side. But the way it did so merely clouded matters. For both parties, haste got in the way.

The broader point here is the horrible way in which our political culture is developing. Its elements are hyper-partisanship, loudness, ferocity and speed – apparent both in political attacks and in the kneejerk defensiveness with which those attacks are so often met.

This atmosphere is perhaps the most significant reason to be sceptical about what a royal commission might achieve. Much of the media coverage of the commission’s findings about antisemitism and social cohesion will inevitably be on those questions already at the centre of public debate: how to treat protests, the role of Israel’s attacks on Gaza, and how much impact political rhetoric can have. It would be surprising if many people already involved in those debates change their minds.

And yet, this is what is demanded of Australians if the commission is to succeed: a willingness to put aside the things we think we know and listen again. Without such willingness, the risk is that the commission becomes an excuse to repeat the arguments of the past two years, with the pitch of debate maintained.

With openness, though, the commission may stand a chance of restoring nuance to a discussion which long ago lost it. And this is important because the disappearance of nuance from our public discussion is something that fosters division. One antidote to this is what Waleed Aly recently termed “grace”: looking “for what is genuine in our opponents’ claims”.

And crucial to this is time: the learnt practice of pausing to push past one’s first reactions. In relation to Bondi, I have kept in mind the call for “a collective pause” made by the not-for-profit leader Jonathan Schleifer, who wrote at the time, drawing in part on the Jewish tradition of shiva: “You can’t demand transformation from a society that hasn’t been allowed to feel the full weight of what’s happened.”

I don’t think that, as a nation, we ever took that pause. But perhaps the commission can offer some version of it – if we pay it attention, rather than treating it as a chance to reiterate what has already been said.

Distance is not always helpful. There are moments when immediacy can lend clarity. This nation has seemed to give climate change its proper level of concern only in the aftermath of drought and bushfire. There is always a danger that time makes us forget what we are dealing with.

This is the true challenge of the discussions we will now have over the next year: to achieve both distance and closeness at once. To think clearly and calmly about the future while keeping in mind the horrific events of these years and the people who have died and suffered: in Israel, in Gaza, in Australia, and the complex ways those horrors have interacted to affect Australians and instil fear in so many Jewish Australians.

Our political classes have shown us how not to do this. We must hope the royal commission does better. After that, the politicians will get another chance, in how they respond to its findings and recommendations.

Sean Kelly is a regular columnist and a former adviser to prime ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

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