Public safety can be strengthened without turning fear into a political performance. When protection becomes theatre, institutions weaken and social division deepens.

A government can do two things at once: protect a community facing real threats, and refuse to let that fear be weaponised into a partisan battering ram.

On antisemitism and communal safety, the Albanese government’s core obligation has been quite practical: resources, coordination, enforcement, prevention – each delivered without turning citizenship into a loyalty test or letting any one faction monopolise the moral microphone. That basic posture matters, because the moment public safety becomes a theatre for factional point-scoring, the state loses its capacity to govern (setting policy, coordinating agencies, allocating resources, enforcing law, preventing harm), and is compelled instead to start the performative rituals of popular auditioning (media cycles, lobby groups, opposition attacks, social platforms).

The loudest critics keep trying to smuggle in a different standard: that “seriousness” is measured by how quickly the Prime Minister echoes their framing, adopts their preferred narrative of blame, and elevates their chosen spokespeople into quasi-official arbiters of national virtue.

This is where outfits like the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), and high-profile figures such as Jillian Segal, too often drift from advocacy into political dramaturgy. Advocacy has a legitimate role – aiding communities to organise, speak, and demand protection. But problems emerge when representation is treated as entitlement – as if speaking for a community also grants authority to speak over the rest of the polity, to police dissent, or to imply that the government’s legitimacy hinges on performing the right rhetorical rituals on cue.

It is also where the Coalition’s familiar reflexes reappear. Josh Frydenberg’s style (well-practised, media-friendly, heavy on moral urgency) fits a political logic that rewards accusation over institution-building. It is easy to say “we warned you,” but it is much harder to design durable arrangements that reduce risk without escalating social division – Frydenberg has come to the public stage with empty hands, in this regard.

When the debate is stuck in a cycle of doom-talk, finger-pointing, and “look how furious I am” performances, it creates noise and ratings – but it doesn’t create safer streets, better coordination, or smarter prevention. The outrage becomes the product, and policy is reduced to a mere prop. It encourages a politics of ‘permanent emergency’, where every tragedy becomes proof of an opponent’s moral failure rather than a test of the state’s administrative competence and social cohesion.

John Howard’s shadow looms over this strategic tendency. The Howard-era lesson was never just “be tough”; it was how to convert cultural anxiety into electoral architecture – how to build a governing style that treats fear as a resource to be managed and redistributed. The danger for us today is that antisemitism, like other forms of hatred, is becoming yet one more lever in that machinery: not chiefly treated as a social harm to be reduced and eradicated, but an issue to be narrated in ways aimed at disciplining one’s various political opponents and also to consolidate a base of support. That approach doesn’t strengthen the polity – it fractures it, because it trains citizens to experience public life as a battle of tribes competing for recognition and protection.

Labor’s rule is simple: the state must be even-handed in citizenship and cold-eyed in administration. Protection is not a favour to be granted to the loudest faction; it is the first duty of rule, owed to all. So you put money where danger gathers, you strengthen the hand of law against intimidation and violence, you invest in prevention, and you keep the boundary clear: protest is permitted, coercion is punished. And you can only do this by preventing your posture from being written by lobbyists, partisan ideologists, or the day’s headlines (i.e. the opinions of the press).

Those who whisper that safety requires less democracy peddle a lazy bargain: trade your real freedom for the appearance of order. A wiser government knows the opposite is often true – if you narrow the civic space then you enable the breeding of resentment; govern by performance and you risk inviting contempt in various forms. The durable path is steady institutions, plain enforcement, and outcomes that can be counted – the quiet work that denies extremists the chaos they feed on.

The political test, then, is not whether Albanese recites the right lines for the right audiences. It is whether the government holds the centre: protecting Jewish Australians (and all Australians) without turning social wounds into a proxy war for factional advantage.

If ECAJ and Jillian Segal want to be constructive, the bar is straightforward: pressure for outcomes, not posture; cooperation over spectacle; accountability without partisan theatre. If Frydenberg and Howard want to be taken seriously, they can start by offering more than denunciations and instead demonstrate how their politics reduce harm, rather than merely reallocating blame.