This week, events called Australia's political leaders to grow up and get serious.
On Monday, the Treasury laid bare the political system's betrayal of Australia's younger generation. Successive governments have bungled the nation's longest boom. They have delivered a big, intractable deficit. The legacy of a 23-year boom and a once-in-a-century mining bonanza is a mounting debt.
And the Treasury midyear report on the budget showed that the problem is worsening. A change of government was not enough to fix it.
On Tuesday, an act of violent hatred in our biggest city imposed a test on our maturity and national unity.
Terrorists have killed and maimed Australians and Australia's interests abroad for a dozen years now. But this week a terrorist penetrated the systems of homeland defence to kill civilians at will in Australia's main commercial precinct.
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