Two countries. Two tragedies. One huge difference.

I’m in Sydney visiting family for Christmas. I’m writing this a short drive from where two gunmen opened fire at a Hanukkah celebration on Sunday, killing 15 people—one of the worst days of violence in modern Australian history.

I’ve lived in the US for nearly 15 years and have covered plenty of its disasters up close, including mass shootings. America was again awash in extreme violence this year. The Sydney massacre unfolded in the aftermath of the shooting at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island. My colleague (and Brown alum) Hannah Levintova reported from a reeling city that had “the energy sucked out of it by fear.” Hannah writes: “What I see now is a city trying to find moments of action and control when most feel helpless.”

Half a world away: same. But the contrast couldn’t be starker. To know both countries is to watch, in split screen, two similar societies diverge radically in how they respond to an atrocity.

Australia’s shock has produced something like consensus: an expectation that institutions and their leaders will search for the truth, messy as it may be, and reckon with it. In America, the trauma of disaster after disaster is compounded by something else: the president’s attack on truth itself.

Trump has torn up America’s post-tragedy script. He doesn’t merely fail to calm waters—he churns them. He scooped his own FBI by racing to release what he knew would be a headline-making morsel in the manhunt for Charlie Kirk’s assassin. Then he and his followers called not for unity, but for retribution—against opponents he said he “hated.” He sowed chaos after a military helicopter collided with a passenger jet over the Potomac in January by quickly and baselessly blaming “DEI.” (Just this week the government admitted fault in the incident.) The murder of director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele became an opportunity to dish out posthumous payback for someone who didn’t like him (killed, Trump said, by “Trump Derangement Syndrome”). Other leaders take Trump’s cue, perform fealty, or contort the facts around his narrative, sometimes literally, by altering the weather map with a Sharpie. Then there was Trump’s months-long gaslighting and incompetence during the Covid crisis.

Make no mistake: There is palpable anger at the government in Australia. I spent time at Bondi this week, talking to Jewish Australians who saw the attack as an inevitable result of escalating antisemitism. Rai Met-Levit, one mourner I met, was livid: “Despite so many threats, despite all the things we said—that this would happen—they have allowed hate speech to be covered up as free speech,” she said.

“It takes something like this to happen for the government to step up, otherwise they’re going to lose a lot of Jewish people,” warned Daryl Rosen, a 61-year-old real estate agent. We spoke overlooking the scene of a hastily abandoned outdoor cinema beside the beach, still strewn with personal possessions in the wake of the shooting. “Blame lies squarely with this government in terms of not making actual changes,” he said.

“We want swift, swift action,” another mourner, Edward Renton, told me.

But here’s the other difference: Australians are getting action. Swiftly. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is moving fast on a new package of gun reforms—recalling Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s quick-acting prime minister after the 2019 Christchurch massacre, and John Howard, the conservative who drove Australia’s vaunted gun control laws after the Port Arthur massacre nearly 30 years ago. (The conservative opposition has said gun reform “must be on the table”—and offered bipartisan support alongside withering criticism of security lapses in protecting Jewish Australians.) Albanese also announced a raft of proposals to crack down on hate speech, and has faced journalists early and often, insisting the buck stops with him. “I, of course, acknowledge that more could have been done, and I accept my responsibility for my part in that as prime minister of Australia,” he said on Thursday. “Anyone in this position would regret not doing more—and any inadequacies which are there.”

Just imagine that coming out of Trump’s mouth.

All week, mainstream local and state leaders across party lines have joined Albanese—“Albo” to Aussies—in calling for unity, and centering Australia’s diversity and democracy as the necessary preconditions for the debates to come. No retribution, they urged. Let the authorities do their work. We’ll tell you what we can, as we go along. “Australia is stronger than the cowards who attacked innocent people today,” Albanese declared on the night of the attack. “Australia will never submit to division, violence or hatred. We will see justice done and we will come through this together.”

“Hold on to the true character of the country that we love,” he said.

That center is holding—for now. It will be tested. Some will capitalize on the disaster to prosecute the immigration wars. Senator Pauline Hanson of the far-right One Nation party visited the memorial this week, telling the crowd: “Certain countries—they should not be allowed to migrate here.” (One gunman was Australian-born, the other, his father, was not.) She has vowed to fight new gun laws. Australia isn’t immune to these polarizing forces. The same outrage bait is driven by the same algorithms here as in the US.

But for all Australians complain about the creep of America’s culture wars (the last election arguably turned, in part, on voters rejecting a flirtation with MAGA-style politics), they can be thankful that the worst of America’s post-atrocity division is, so far, being held at bay. The days ahead will be tough enough without a wrecking crew at the heart of public life, dismantling the ways we grieve together and move toward change. Healing may still be a long way off. But five days after the tragedy, Australians are reaching for one another and arguing, in public, about reforms already on the table. Put another way, they’re uniting.

For now, at least, the government has been a gaslight-free zone. That kind of competence in the face of horror is a form of grace.