In December 2019, former Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, went to Hawaii for a family holiday.

In his absence, his Deputy took the reins. The system worked as it should.

As happens every year in Australia – every year – the summer flames were mounting their presence. Bushfires were breaking out. Two volunteer firefighters died in NSW.

It was then the gates opened: the shrill squeals surged forth from the Australian media demanding the Prime Minister leave his togs and towel behind and to get himself quick sticks back home.

But Mr Morrison was right to tell Sydney’s 2GB radio that he doesn’t ‘hold a hose’ or ‘sit in a control room’.

His was a statement of perfect, accurate, appropriate candour, bereft of the saccharine empathy sought by some.

While the cameras might love the posturing, little is achieved by political figures swanning through charred landscapes of shrivelled iron. Media advisers and city-based pollsters might get excited at the sight of fluorescent vests, but few others share the thrill.

In truth, politicians are in the way.

Australians generally like to keep politics on the low, and most understand that a Prime Minister does not have to be swatting away smoke to understand the danger, damage and financial ravages of bushfires. This is especially true for federal MPs given emergency responses are the bailiwick of the states. But social media is king. And it loves high-vis.

It is enough that the government is in control and all that can be done is being done.

But for Morrison, the squeals from the Left continued and the Hawaiian sands faded. His apology was not enough. Hawaii became the cherry on top of a deliciously political cake baked by his foes.

Four years later, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese finds himself on another island in the Pacific Ocean. And back home, there are fires burning.

These are the embers of racial tension sparking and smouldering and daring to burst into ugly flame.

The smoking coals on city streets are the angry chants from Palestinian protestors – they call for the gassing of Jews. Punches were thrown in the strongly Jewish Melbourne suburb of Caulfield. Mobs rallied outside a synagogue.

Incendiary behaviours, previously unfamiliar to this place, are testing the racial and religious respect so beloved in Australia.

But silence has befallen the media, unable to replicate for Albanese the noise it made for Morrison to return home when fires are burning. Different islands, different Prime Ministers, different politics, different standards.

Unlike real bushfires, this is a federal issue demanding attention to homeland safety and security, and an insistence that acts of racial and religious discrimination are not dismissed.

While his predecessor was right to say it wasn’t his job to put out the flames, the task of this Prime Minister is to grasp the biggest political hose he can get. He must immediately douse the racial tensions that place Australian Jews in fear.

For they are in fear. Threats against their lives are being made. And the lives of their loved ones in Israel have been taken. Yes, Palestinian lives have also been lost, and their Hamas leaders will have some explaining when a reckoning comes.

But barely a boo, a whimper, a whisper about Albanese’s need to ‘come home’ from the same frothing media which demanded Morrison’s return.

The Albanese Labor government has the flames of radicalism inside a tinder box of racial tension to address. The Prime Minister needs to ask himself about his role in the unrest, having sought political refuge and alignment in one of Australia’s largest mosques during the Voice debate.

Mr Albanese is not helped by his Foreign Affairs Minister, Penny Wong, who many argue has stoked tensions by calling for a ceasefire and for Israel to avoid impacting hospitals in Gaza. It is a baffling request given the well-understood Hamas modus operandi for placing its citizens on the front line: people protecting the ‘soldiers’ not the soldiers protecting the people.

Hamas could not care less. But Senator Wong, look at the detail more carefully.

The Geneva Convention of 1949 is alert to the weaponising of institutions such as hospitals during war.

Minister Wong would know, should know, the standards made clear in the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949.

Chapter III, Article 21, says of Medical Units and Establishments that:

‘The protection to which fixed establishments and mobile medical units of the Medical Service are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy. Protection may, however, cease only after a due warning has been given, naming, in all appropriate cases, a reasonable time limit and after such warning has remained unheeded.’

Israel has abided by the Convention.

Prime Minister Albanese needs to come home – and stay a while.

Much water is needed to cool the tensions of a nation that should not be feeling so volatile, so potentially fragile.

The tyranny of distance serves Australia well in times of war elsewhere. But the war of words knows no borders and travels at speed. It finds megaphones on local streets and bellows to fan the heat from within.

Mr Albanese needs to hose down the nonsense, the intolerance, the rage.

Tuvalu will not sink anytime soon, but his leadership might.