Opposition Leader Bill Shorten hasn't been vastly better, though he has named the booing as racist, declaring it was obvious Goodes was being targeted because of his Indigenous background. His advice to those he calls "idiots"? "Just shut up. Don't say anything. Keep your thoughts to yourself." Adam Goodes. Credit:Getty Images Abbott took a week during which Australians had churned themselves into a dangerous stew of bitterly opposing views, the idiocy spilling out of the stands, before saying anything at all. Yet he has shown himself as a man capable of swift judgment when he feels it necessary. It took him mere minutes to defend "the sacred right of free speech" after a Federal Court ruled in 2011 that conservative columnist Andrew Bolt had breached the Racial Discrimination Act by writing an article that implied light-skinned people who identified as Aboriginal did so for personal gain.

"Free speech means the right of people to say what you don't like, not just the right of people to say what you do like," he said, and then decided to change the Racial Discrimination Act before finding it too hard. In choosing to stay outside the ring over the Goodes mob bullying, Abbott reveals a further contradiction about himself. He is the first prime minister to spend annual time in indigenous communities - an act of statesmanship. Yet he is pussyfooting around while a former Australian of the Year, an Indigenous man who has dragged himself out of poverty through force of character and a level of sporting talent that has earned him two Brownlow Medals, is so distressed by a contemporary ugliness he has taken himself out of the arena, possibly for good. Goodes has played 365 games. No one can call him inexperienced in judging the mood of a crowd, or of being a coward.

In choosing to stay outside the ring over the Goodes mob bullying, Abbott reveals a further contradiction about himself. Tony Wright Abbott says he can understand why Goodes is upset, adding "no one should be subject to taunts", and "certainly the last thing we want in Australia is anything at all that smacks of racism". Anyone who has been anywhere near the growing mob that has been abusing Goodes week in, week out, in a manner reserved for no other player, could tell him that it more than "smacks of racism". Critics, including friends of the Prime Minister, have offered the exotic argument that Goodes himself should apologise to a 13-year-old girl for calling her out for calling him an "ape" in the first place. In fact, Goodes, immediately after the incident, made clear his moral compass wasn't askew - he called for the girl to be supported. His point was that a part of society had let her down by allowing her to believe it was okay to call a black man an ape in public. Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, James Packer and a crowd of 100 chose on Friday to offer three public cheers for Adam Goodes while launching Crown's Reconciliation Action Plan. The NSW Premier has declared baldly of Goodes' treatment that "some may argue that the line between good-natured and malicious heckling can be fuzzy" adding "but there is nothing fuzzy about this. The line has been crossed."

When leadership concerning a nation's heart comes from a casino boss and state premiers, the prime minister's ability to lead his nation's people to what he regularly calls their "better angels" has to be questioned. Follow us on Twitter







