The Process Shield
Two governments, two crises, one reflex: let a process carry the first weeks, and commit once refusing costs more than acting. The pattern crosses parties and countries. So does the exception.
Two governments, two crises, one reflex: let a process carry the first weeks, and commit once refusing costs more than acting. The pattern crosses parties and countries. So does the exception.
I keep a file of moments when a leader chose between fronting a crisis and routing it through a process. Two are open on my desk this week.
Start with fairness. Under the Fifth Republic constitution, the Government "determines and conducts the policy of the Nation" and answers to Parliament (Article 20). The prime minister directs its action (Article 21). The president appoints the prime minister (Article 8). Domestic heat is meant to land on the prime minister, and a fight over school funding sits squarely in that lane.
The blockades began in mid-September over absent teachers and crumbling buildings.
President Emmanuel Macron spoke on 30 September. In my paraphrase of franceinfo's French report, he said he understood the students' anxieties and anger and condemned the violence. Then the process carried the weight. On 7 October Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez suspended stun grenades at school protests "until the facts of the incident have been clarified." The same day Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu went on air. "The anger of young people doesn't come from nowhere," he said, in my translation, and offered a consultation, first decisions by the end of October and a budget debate on 12 November. Macron's visible role that week was an emergency meeting with ministers on 6 October.
Then, on 8 October, the government gave ground. Education Minister Edouard Geffray told TF1's evening news that 3,000 supply teachers not currently in front of pupils would join the worst-hit schools "in the coming hours." The BBC called it the first material concession to the protesters. Student groups were guarded.
The system has now produced something concrete. Here is what it still costs. Article 6 limits a president to two consecutive terms, and the election to choose Macron's successor is due in April. A president who cannot run again has the least electoral reason to stand behind anyone, and the most freedom to stand in front. Holding the lectern at arm's length means the most durable figure in the state is the least visible one. From a blockaded school, the calendar reads: about three weeks of protest, a consultation, then a first concrete step, announced by the education minister rather than the president. Each step is defensible, and the latest one is real.
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On 14 December 2025, an attack on a Hanukkah gathering at Bondi killed 15 people and wounded 40 more, as the royal commission's Letters Patent record. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese fronted that night and convened the National Security Committee. Nobody can fault the first hours.
On 29 December, 15 days after the attack, the government chose a review led by Dennis Richardson, due to report by April, and argued that a royal commission would take years and risk giving a platform to the worst voices.
Then the pressure built, and the record shows who applied it. Relatives of 11 of the victims had appealed for a royal commission on 29 December. On 2 January at least 120 business leaders and sporting figures signed an open letter, the president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference wrote calling for a wider national inquiry, and the Human Rights Commissioner called a royal commission essential, The Guardian reported. An open letter from legal figures, including former judges, reached 213 signatures. On 6 January the Law Council of Australia added its voice. Inside Labor, a letter from party figures organised by former Victorian deputy premier James Merlino joined the call.
On 8 January, 25 days after the attack and ten days after choosing the review, Albanese announced a Commonwealth royal commission led by Virginia Bell, with the Richardson review folded in. That evening on the ABC's 7.30 he said "it's just been 25 days... since that travesty," and that "what people want in their leader as well is someone who will listen and will adjust positions." He moved once the pressure became impossible to ignore.
The interim report was due on 30 April 2026 and was tabled that day. It made 14 recommendations, five of them confidential, and found existing legal frameworks had not prevented or hindered agencies; no agency reported a need for urgent law reform. The final report is due on 14 December 2026, the first anniversary.
In March Richardson resigned as the commission's special adviser. He said he had been treated as a "highly paid researcher" and, as the ABC reported in April, warned that Bell would take too long to deliver urgent recommendations about intelligence and policing agencies. He also said his decision had nothing to do with the government or Bell, and that Australians should have confidence in the inquiry. Bell had said in February that the interim report was unlikely to include final conclusions on those agencies.
So the process, once chosen, kept its own timetable. But the trade made in those 25 days is now visible. A narrow security review became one strand of a broad inquiry, and its leader walked away warning the urgent part would take too long. I cannot show the review alone would have done better. Nor can I say the commission delivered everything the review promised, on the review's schedule. What the delay certainly cost was a stretch of weeks in which grieving families, lawyers, bishops and business leaders had to ask in public.
None of this is a party story. A review, a consultation, a prime minister at the microphone: each lets a leader hold back commitment until refusing costs more than acting. A Labor government in Canberra and a centrist president in Paris reached for it in the same season, under very different constitutions.
The clearest exception sits on the other side of Australian politics. After the Port Arthur massacre on 28 April 1996, Liberal prime minister John Howard moved fast: on 10 May, twelve days after the shooting, federal, state and territory governments agreed the National Firearms Agreement with bipartisan support. More than 650,000 firearms were later surrendered. Fronting early carries its own risk, because you own the result. Howard chose to own it.
Across my global-patterns file the same shape keeps recurring: the process is rarely the problem; the timing is.
No one in either story broke a rule. That is the point. The rules allow a leader to stand behind the lectern, and in both countries the process has since produced real things: supply teachers in Paris, an interim report on time in Canberra. The timeline still records who stood in front, and when.
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