IT WAS SURPRISINGLY sunny the Sunday morning in October when we bumped into the PM. On a broken suburban footpath I nearly tripped over the leash that restrained her cavoodle puppy. We were walking and talking, my daughter and I, on Mugga Way, the bush boulevard below Red Hill. Until our eyes met from under her cap I hadn’t recognised Australia’s first female Prime Minister, strolling with her partner and a couple of equally casually dressed protective services officers.

Only in Australia, probably only in Canberra, could a citizen casually come across a prime minister on a weekend morning and have a yarn under the gum trees.