Once untouchable, Albanese ends the year under siege

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“All I’m focused on is continuing to work,” Albanese said in Canberra. He offered no suggestion on alternative federal or state probes into either antisemitism or how authorities failed to stop the attack.

The prime minister used the same press conference to emphasise new videos more firmly tying the Bondi killers to Islamic State.

“This has been around for a long period of time,” he said, pointing out that Islamic extremism was not new and subtly attempting to de-link the massacre from the antisemitism debate.

When asked if Islamic extremism was the nation’s biggest security threat, as news emerged about the religious motivations of men on the way to Bondi, Albanese placed jihadists alongside other bad actors.

“I want to deal with all of the threats, whether it be extremist perversions of Islam leading to support for the ideology promoted by ISIS, whether it be also concerned about the issue of sovereign citizens killing police… I’m concerned about neo-Nazis,” he said.

Albanese is right to say there are myriad bad actors in the world. However, one of his MPs said the prime minister should have spoken in black-and-white terms from at least Monday about the scourge of fundamentalism.

The prime minister will never match the demands of right-wingers, some of whom are plainly bigoted towards Muslims, on how he should speak about extremists at the fringes of the Muslim community. But some MPs in his own camp believe he has sometimes avoided taking values-based stances on antisemitism for fear of angering Muslim voters in Labor seats, a claim the prime minister would deny.

Albanese showed a hint of contrition on Thursday about Labor’s response to the rise in bigotry towards Jews. Part of what has frustrated Jewish leaders is their view that Albanese has tended to create false equivalence.

In response to a question on antisemitism on Friday, he said: “Some of these things are not new. James Saleam, [white nationalist organisation] National Action [founder], tried to kill Eddie Funde from the African National Congress. When I was a student, I was a candidate against that reprehensible fascist at Sydney University in 1983. This has been around a long period of time. Issues have escalated and we need to take action against all of them,” he said.

The government has taken big steps this week to crack down on hate preachers, which no Coalition government has previously done. But if his task over summer is to prove he is a statesman capable of holding the country together, deflection, false equivalence and delay will not get him far.