Albanese was so desperate to prove he cares about gendered violence, he forgot one thing: if you're a proper leader, it's not about you

The world is full of imponderables at the moment. And for Australian women, you can add a new one to the list: How long is it going to take for us to get a prime minister whose response to reasonable female anger isn't to trip spectacularly over his own tackle?

The footage of Anthony Albanese attempting to cope with the febrile environment outside Parliament House at Sunday's domestic violence rally is nearly unwatchable.

Not because he's a bad guy. But because it is just difficult to watch a political leader — whose entire skill set is supposed to be about competent judgement under fire — get it so horribly wrong.

Today, that prime minister will convene a meeting of the COVID-era national cabinet to consider urgent action on the escalating rate at which women in this country are murdered by their partners or ex-partners.

More on that in a moment, but first, it's worth a recap of what exactly happened on Sunday.

The "No More" rally in Canberra was organised by a group called What Were You Wearing? Australia (WWYWA), which describes itself as "an Indigenous-led not-for-profit organisation fighting to end sexual violence". It was established and is led by a woman called Sarah Williams. She is 23.

Sunday's rally was one of several around the nation in recent weeks. The Canberra crowd — including the prime minister, Status of Women Minister Katy Gallagher, and Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth — gathered on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin and walked peacefully to Parliament House. It is agreed by all that there was some back-and-forth with WWYWA about whether the PM or Gallagher would speak, but by the time the rally started, none of the politicians were on the planned speaking list.

When the group reached Parliament House, Ms Williams told her own story, a truly harrowing one of violence, fear, rape, flight and homelessness. To our nation's shame, hers is not a rare story. What is rare, however, is for someone so young to find, so quickly, deep inside herself, in that broken place, the fortitude to convert her own pain into action for others.

And before another single word is said, it needs to be recognised that hardly anyone to whom such dreadful things have happened can do this. No-one should be expected to do it, or thought less courageous or heroic when they can't. And when they do, the last thing any of us should expect is that they will be perfect at it. Full stop.

Which is why what happened next was so awful.

Let's review the tape

Ms Williams had five demands of the government. She went through them one by one, as the ministers present knew she would. She asked the government to declare a national emergency. To teach domestic violence first responders not to blame victims, and to provide alternative reporting options beyond the police. To ban media from identifying domestic violence victims immediately after their deaths. And of course, more funding.

As she read out these demands, Ms Williams asked the ministers present to give her a thumbs-up or thumbs-down as to whether they would promise to fulfil them. The crowd grew — as crowds do — restive. There was heckling. People were demanding answers.

Ms Williams says she was happy for the PM to speak "if he was going to commit to one of our demands". She didn't want platitudes, she wanted solid promises. Yesterday morning she told 2GB's Ben Fordham that she asked the crowd to make the call as to whether the PM should speak.

"While I was saying that, he said, behind me, which many people heard, 'I'm the prime minister, I run this country'," she told Fordham.

A review of the tape confirms that the PM did say, among the hubbub, "I'm the prime minister". It's not clear that he said the second part, but he hasn't denied it on the multiple opportunities he's been invited to do so in media interviews since.

The bigger problem is actually what he did when he was eventually handed the microphone, which was to make it about himself.

"We did ask to speak, myself and Katy. And were told that that wasn't possible and that's fine. I respect the organisers' right to do that," he said. Whereupon Ms Williams declared: "That's a straight-out lie", and burst into tears, and was swiftly surrounded and comforted by friends as the PM ploughed on with a series of remarks about what his government had already done in this area.

Ms Williams' distress cannot have been unnoticed by the PM. She was standing so close to him that the ABC's single camera angle captured Ms Williams crying, the PM speaking, and on the other side of him, Katy Gallagher, for whom one fervently hopes a new Oscars category will be devised: "Best Sustained Neutral Expression Amid a Live Emerging Shitshow".

At one point, the PM took a glance across at Ms Williams and clearly clocked what was happening, and did not interrupt his self-narrated account of governmental achievement. At another, in response to a heckler, his tone grew fractious: "I agree it's not enough. I said that!"

Typical of most genuine debacles, there is nuance here. And different perspectives, because of course everyone involved is a human being, and that's how humans roll.

Ms Williams had been working around the clock for weeks, and she'd just shared the most painful detail of her life to a large crowd of strangers, only to be chipped by the most powerful man in Australia over the process question of whether or not he was formally invited to speak.

Her tears were a reasonable response. The phrase "It's not about you, mate" — which should have a bloody tea-towel in the Parliament House gift shop, or perhaps a placard, so urgently and regularly is it required in that building — was never more called-for than at this moment.

Katy Gallagher, loyal soul that she is, knew it; you could tell by the way she quietly declined the microphone when the PM attempted to have her add some remarks once he had concluded his own.

And the prime minister: Well. You can see how his brain has worked here, too. He wants to be the PM who shows up, not the one who hides in his office from angry women, or reminds them from the dispatch box how fortunate they are not to live in a country where they get shot. Or the one who stands in front of protest signs calling a female politician a man's "bitch".

The PM forgot one thing

This particular protest was literally about women getting killed — 28 so far THIS YEAR — a figure that has been revised even in the time it's taken for this column to be written and sub-edited.

It is not a rally the PM wants to dodge — the option that would without question have been the preference of his close personal protection team.

He has an emergency national cabinet scheduled for today. He cares about the issue. He's trying to do something. His closest political allies are people like Penny Wong and Katy Gallagher and Linda Burney, who herself has endured family violence. He's OK with strong women. And he obviously did not enjoy being jeered or challenged or having his sincere efforts dismissed by an angry crowd.

Being booed in your own backyard — as a politician — is never fun. Ask John Howard, who fronted up to his own angry voters in a flak jacket to defend his decision to take their guns away. Ask Penny Wong, who invoked the rage of the gay community when she resolved to work on advancing same-sex marriage within her resistant party, rather than quit in disgust.

But if you're a proper leader, if you're doing it right, it's not about you.

And if you decide to go to a protest as a prime minister, then you have to expect two things: One, you will be heckled by people, some of whom will say things you find unfair. Two: You are unlikely to get the deckle-edged invitation to speak that is the usual process with a person of your status.

When you make the call to go somewhere in order to comfort distressed or traumatised people, then you have to be prepared to deal with those people as you find them.

Scott Morrison's family holiday to Hawaii during the bushfires is regularly cited as his low-point. And sure, the cover-up and the "I don't hold a hose" comment weren't great.

But the worst and most enduring image of that time is actually the point at which the then-PM went to Cobargo and greeted an exhausted firefighter, who HAD been holding a hose, and declared himself unwilling to shake the jovially proffered prime ministerial hand. Mr Morrison grabbed the man's hand and forced the shake. A dreadful implicit reproach to this smoke-smeared volunteer for … rudeness? A terrible moment, because the PM made it all about him.

"I am the prime minister" — which Mr Morrison was wont to declare from time to time — is a perfectly redundant phrase and should never be used. By anyone. Because when uttered by anyone who's not the prime minister, it's an untruth. And the one Australian in a position to deploy that sentence just never, ever should. Because it's bleeding obvious to everyone that that person is the prime minister, and saying it out loud will as a result never sound like anything but a weird flex.

Ms Williams accused Mr Albanese of "misogyny". That is an unfair accusation, on balance. But honestly, the definition of misogyny is pretty clear; it's a hatred of women. Both Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott have had that word applied to them, and I'd hesitate to use it about either of them.

Being motivated by the hatred of women and being inept at noticing how the world works for women because you've always been a man — they are two different things. The second, in a man of good heart and preparedness to examine his own worldview, is much more fixable than the first.

We must join the dots

The prime minister is, as every commentator will tell you, currently managing a number of crises. Women are being killed. The cost of living remains horrendously high, and the hope of an interest rate cut this year has evaporated. He's in a fight with Elon Musk about the horrific online content that that man — along with other tech titans — is cool about hosting and dripping into the minds of internet users, including young men.

All of these crises are discussed earnestly and — in the main — separately, and the discussion is usually about process. For instance, whether the escalating rate of women being murdered by their partners or ex-partners is a "crisis", in which case thoughts and prayers and working groups, or an "emergency" which in this country means direct financial assistance, the dispatching of the army and so on.

Can't we be smart enough to join the dots?

I mean, the cost of living crisis isn't just "Decent Hardworking Australians Horrified At Two-Minute Noodles Price Doubling". For a woman in a high-risk relationship, cost of living increases don't just mean everyone in her house is angrier and more stressed and less likely to enjoy sometimes foods. They also mean her chances of leaving and renting a place for herself and her kids, if she has them, on one income instead of two, have gone from already-slim to actually-non-existent.

And for some such women, misogynistic online content like Andrew Tate's that is fed to angry men (by algorithms also mainly designed by men) isn't cause for some pleasurable intellectual joust about freedom of speech. It comes at the cost — perhaps an actual physical cost, borne entirely by her — of a man in her life being told it's OK to control and dominate a woman.

Please, let this national cabinet today join the dots, and make good and urgent decisions.

When people lose their homes to flood and fire, the government gives them money so they can keep living. When the virus stopped people from going to work, the government paid their employers billions of dollars so that they could keep having jobs, so they could keep living.

"Why doesn't she just leave?" is the question historically and stupidly asked of women who live in dangerous homes. And if the answer is "Because she can't afford to", then how complicated can the solution really be?

How about we pay her rent for a year? Buy her a car and a fridge and a new bed and a decent security system? So she can keep living. Call it, I don't know, "WomanKeeper"? We've done bigger things, people. We know this isn't beyond us.