If words matters, as they should, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull passed a crucial leadership test this week.
His response to the callous murder of an innocent Australian, by a 15-year-old, was spot on.
It was shocking, he told the nation. It was a cold-blooded, he said. It was made worse because it was perpetrated by a teenager.
All true. All factual. And then he added this: “The Australian Muslim community will be especially appalled and shocked by this.’’
“As [NSW Police] Commissioner Andrew Scipione and the Premier [Mike Baird] have noted, we must not vilify or blame the entire Muslim community with the actions of what is, in truth, a very, very small percentage of violent extremist individuals."
And there you have it - a key distinction between Turnbull, and the person he rolled, Tony Abbott.
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Abbott used terror, and the threat it held, as a campaign tool, fanning fear with a constant reminder of the death cults that were making their home amongst us. We were encouraged to be alarmed.
“They're coming after us," he said, after attacks in France earlier this year. “We may not feel like we are at war with them, but they are certainly at war with us."
That type of response feeds insecurity; a point made even clearer when he scoffed at the authority of our courts by arguing his government required the power to stop citizenship to anyone who left our shores to fight overseas. “What happens if they get off? That’s the problem,’’ he said.
Leadership is about many things, but words, and how they are used, really matter.
Turnbull’s attacked the murderous act, rather than a big chunk of our community, most of whom were appalled by the brazen homicide.
For too long, being shrill has been seen as a leadership KPI; some weird algorithm seemed to encourage leaders to believe the louder they were, the more we listened.
Voters hate that, and you can take the fall of Campbell Newman, the former Queensland premier, as a stellar example.
Newman was swept to power on the back of one of the biggest Parliamentary majorities in Australian history, only to be humiliated at the polls three years later. He didn’t only lose his own seat, his Party was banished to Opposition.
Now, new Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is winning unlikely allies, including in business, despite being slow to make big decisions. She’s gambled on the polar-opposition approach to her predecessor; a promise to listen and consult before decisions were made. It’s only early days, but she’s winning in the polls.
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Malcolm Turnbull looks like taking a similar approach, and if he is able to carry it off, it will prove to be a game changer - in terms of his leadership and how voters respond.
It was during that other show in town this week - the Cowboys v Broncos rugby league grand final - that we saw genuine and spontaneous leadership.
No big discussion enveloped the history around two Indigenous captains - Jonathan Thurston and Justin Hodges - leading their teams onto the field, or when Thurston’s daughter hugged her Indigenous doll.
And few words were exchanged when Thurston and Hodges hugged for seconds, at the end of a hard-fought match. Leadership. Sportsmanship. Rugby League, in a picture we should see much more often.
In the aftermath of that clash, former Broncos star Shane Webcke was asked why Wayne Bennett, the Broncos coach, continued to be seen as a strong leader.
Webcke told the story of his own father’s death while he was still young enough to be one of 150 footballers with potential, and nothing more.
At the funeral, Webcke walked out, devastated, focused on his job of helping to carry his father’s coffin.
Through the fog of grief, he noticed a tall figure standing back, in the distance. Wayne Bennett had traveled hours to support a kid from the bush, who one day might or might not make it into the big league.
“From that day, he had me,’’ Webcke said.
Bennett didn’t talk much on that day; he didn’t need anyone to hear his voice.
Words matter, but it’s when and how they are used that matters most.
Madonna King is a senior journalist, and has worked at News Corporation Australia, Fairfax and the ABC. She is the author of six books, including a biography of Joe Hockey.
