The first indication something terrible had happened was the buzz of a notification on my phone. Unconfirmed reports of a shooting in Bondi, it said.

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Thousands of kilometres away, in the airconditioned cool of a Bali hotel room, I paid little attention to that first ping. Another public place shooting in Sydney was so commonplace, it was hardly noteworthy.

But as the alerts kept coming it became obvious this was far worse than the gangland violence to which Sydneysiders have grown inured. For the next few hours we sat glued to our phones, distant and powerless as the extent of the horror was laid bare.

We checked on family and on our Jewish friend who could have been at the Chanukah event but, to our great relief, wasn't. We watched in astonishment the videos on social media. The panicked crowds scrambling for safety. The two gunmen on the footbridge. The extraordinary heroism of Ahmed al-Ahmed, the Sutherland shopkeeper who wrested the shotgun from one of the gunmen.

We shared the shock, anger and grief of our fellow Australians back home. For a brief moment, we all seemed on the same page in condemning a barbaric act of anti-Semitic terrorism.

Then politics in all its ugliness intruded on that sense of unity, smothering it from all sides.

There was the ever-cautious prime minister, loath to yield to immediate calls for a royal commission with some good reason but hamstrung by his infamous clumsiness in explaining his thinking. Yes, royal commissions can take years before they report and offer recommendations. And yes, urgent action is required and the way to get there is via an independent review led by Dennis Richardson, which will report by April.

But no, a royal commission will not necessarily platform extremist views, as claimed by the PM and his Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke. That's absolute bunkum. Royal commissions can decide what evidence is given in public or in camera. The smarter approach from Albanese would have been to reserve his decision on a royal commission - not rule it in or out but await Richardson's report.........

© Canberra Times