#public-debate

#public-debate

To be clear: the Bondi attack was horrific. It has left people shaken, grieving and afraid, particularly in communities already living with heightened vulnerability. That fear is real and it deserves empathy and compassion, and the board may well have believed it was acting in good faith. But fear also has a way of reducing our moral and intellectual horizons.

"I'm expected to tell you all why this is the worst city in the world," Sam Kriss, a writer from London, began. He stood at a lectern in the middle of the dark room. The sold-out audience - an uneven mix of techno-optimists and -pessimists, faux centrists and progressives - listened between sips of champagne.

A man tried to lift a woman out of a sandpit, "but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces." The detonation buried a woman and her infant alive.