Bondi political fallout

The Australian leader faces a far-right rush to blame immigration.

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Welcome to Balance of Power, bringing you the latest in global politics. If you haven't yet, sign up here. The deadly attack by a father and son on Jewish Australians gathered at Bondi Beach for a religious festival has horrified the country, where mass shootings are mercifully rare. It is also feeding into some tricky terrain in a country that prides itself on a rich history of multiculturalism and tolerance — the famed Aussie "fair go" — but which in reality has become increasingly divided on migration, race and religion. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is leading a nation in mourning, but one where politicians on the far right are already using the tragedy to rail against immigration, and Muslim immigration in particular. Albanese during a news conference in Sydney yesterday. Photographer: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg The problem is not access to guns, says One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, it's letting the wrong people in. Hanson is an astute politician who's been around for decades. She's adept at tapping into the mood of those who feel left behind economically — Australia like many countries grapples with income inequality alongside soaring housing prices — and who are looking for someone to blame. With police tying the shooters to Islamist extremism, and the father an immigrant, it's harder for Albanese to counter Hanson's inflammatory rhetoric. Albanese had been on a bit of a roll. He won reelection in May in a landslide for his Labor Party, and has managed to keep the Aukus defense pact with the US alive under Donald Trump. The opposition, significantly reduced, has been corroded by infighting. Shoes and other personal belongings abandoned during the attack gathered to a side at Bondi Beach. Photographer: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg So he has some political capital to deploy. Former Prime Minister John Howard famously used his in 1996 to push through radical gun laws in the wake of another massacre — at Port Arthur by a lone gunman — against some significant opposition. Even so, Albanese will need to be deft to avoid the horrors of Bondi spinning into the toxic politics of the far right. — Rosalind Mathieson Global Must Reads President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he has an agreement with the US to make security guarantees for Ukraine legally binding through a vote in Congress as part of a peace deal to end Russia's war. The new chief of Britain's foreign intelligence service MI6 said Russian President Vladimir Putin is deliberately prolonging negotiations, an assessment that complicates Trump's efforts to broker an agreement by year-end to halt the conflict. Zelenskiy and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Berlin yesterday. 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Reiner's son, Nick, was later arrested by the Los Angeles police department. The United Nations cut food rations for people in Gaza by half, citing Israeli restrictions that continue to impact the organization's humanitarian efforts, underscoring the fragility of aid operations two months after a US-brokered ceasefire with Hamas. Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was injured last week while secretly leaving the country to receive her Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, with doctors identifying a fracture in one of her spinal vertebrae, Norwegian outlet Aftenposten reported. Machado at the opening of the Nobel Peace Prize Exhibition 2025 in Oslo on Dec. 11. Photographer: Naina Helén Jåma/Bloomberg The UK finalized a long-awaited free-trade agreement with South Korea that the government said would grow services exports while easing the sales of goods from luxury Bentley cars to Scottish salmon. Trump filed a lawsuit in Miami suing the BBC for at least $10 billion over a misleading edit in a documentary that gave the impression he'd made a direct call for violence leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by his supporters. Sign up for the Washington Edition newsletter for news from the US capital and watch Balance of Power at 1 and 5 p.m. ET weekdays on Bloomberg Television. Chart of the Day Billionaire politician Thaksin Shinawatra's family, which has long dominated Thai politics, nominated another member of the dynasty as a prime ministerial candidate for the Pheu Thai Party in a general election on Feb. 8. Thailand is holding snap elections following the dissolution of parliament last week by Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, who is banking on nationalist sentiment stirred by an armed conflict with neighbor Cambodia to return to power. Polls suggest it'll be a showdown between Anutin's Bhumjaithai Party and the reformist People's Party, which has consistently led in surveys. And Finally Residents of Brazil's major cities spend an average of almost two hours a day commuting, trapped in traffic that exposes them to the threat of ambush. While Brazil's homicide rate has declined over the past decade, it's still among the world's highest, and security consistently ranks among the top concerns in polls. That uncomfortable reality is prompting Brazilians to snap up armored cars as residents of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and other cities look to protect themselves against increasingly visible violent crime — turning Brazil into the world's top armored car producer, making four times as many units as No. 2 Mexico. An employee of Carbon, Brazil's leading car armoring company, at the plant in São Paulo. 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