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This is, if nothing else, a violation of their job description. We don’t ask a great deal of people in politics. We don’t expect them to be all knowing, or all wise. We know that there are experts to advise them, but that even with the very best advice, they will always be at the mercy of events — events such as terrorist attacks.

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What we do expect of them is that they will help the rest of us keep it together in the face of such threats: that they will use the platform they have been given to put things in perspective, to add context, to keep us focused on what matters, to ease fears, to resolve divisions, in all to find the right words to say at the right time to the right people. To be politic, in other words.

At the very least, we expect them not to make things worse. And yet what has been the experience of recent days and weeks?

There is perhaps a legitimate debate to be had about what the niqab symbolizes, and whether people should be able to cover their faces in citizenship ceremonies, with all that they symbolize. I think they should have that right — I think that is one of the things the ceremony symbolizes — but I recognize there are people of goodwill who take the opposite view.

That did not require the prime minister, of all people, to open up that debate, of all debates, in the immediate aftermath of an Islamist terrorist attack, of all times, at a partisan rally, of all places. Neither did it require him to do so in such incendiary terms: it is “offensive,” he said last month, announcing the government would appeal a Federal Court ruling overturning the niqab ban; it is “anti-women” he said this week in Parliament. That he nevertheless chose to say what he did in the way that he did at the time and place that he did must therefore be regarded as deliberate, for whatever purposes he may hope it will achieve.