Timing matters just as much in tragedy as it does in comedy. And it is important to remember that the Opera House protest which caused such outrage took place after the appalling toll of the Hamas attacks had been reported, but before we knew much about the scale of the Israeli government’s response to it. So it is fair to characterise the public delight which a very small number of Australians took in the violent death of 1,300+ Israeli citizens as an unusually sickening species of schadenfreude. For that reason alone, politicians and public servants of every stripe should have been quick to condemn it, and those who weren’t must now regret it. We are all, to some extent, capable of deriving satisfaction from the misfortune of others, especially if they happen to be our enemies. But it is hard to imagine Jews dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv and Brooklyn – let alone Caulfield and Bondi – to celebrate the collateral deaths of ordinary Palestinians which has been an inevitable result of IDF reprisals. If events have proved me wrong by the time you read this, it will be terrible grist to the terrorist mill.

My faith in the essential good nature of most Australians leads me to believe that most of those who voted No to the Voice took no real pleasure in the result, and that their overwhelming feeling now is relief rather than triumph. Relief not just because what they saw, rightly or wrongly, as a dangerous constitutional precedent has been averted, but because their government can now get back to addressing issues which most Australians – irrespective of their ethnicity – evidently consider to be more pressing. And while Yes campaigners are understandably and desperately disappointed, I can’t believe that their efforts over the past months have not pricked the collective conscience to the point where the people who are given the funding to address the problems which still afflict our remote indigenous communities will from now on find themselves a lot more accountable than has heretofore been the case.

Meanwhile, those of us who survive on a diet rich in the misfortune of others can always turn for sustenance to the sports, entertainment and business pages. As Australians we are committed to the maintenance of the level playing field, of course, so we can only really rejoice in failure which has a tall poppy dimension to it. That is, if the Icarus in question was already to some degree elevated above the common herd prior to strapping on his wings. Who can honestly say they would have smiled just as broadly about the predicament Alan Joyce now finds himself in if it hadn’t been for that bonus (surely the only time in aviation history when an airline employee has looked forward to being given a parachute)? Who can say they wouldn’t feel a tad more sympathy for Eddie Jones if it hadn’t been for the astonishing hubris which has informed his every public statement since getting off that plane in January? And who would deny that the pomp attending to the title Director of Public Prosecutions – not to mention the wig and gown and the sneering self-righteousness of their wearer – did not add a certain bada-boom to the drumming out of Drumgold? But can there be a fall from grace more enjoyable to watch than one suffered by a man who, in addition to enjoying all the trapping of wealth and fame, also boasts at every opportunity about his sexual conquests? The only Australian who has come close to attracting the opprobrium now cascading onto Russell Brand must be Rolf Harris.

And the only Australian to have turned schadenfreude into art is probably Clive James. As far as I know he never identified the subject of his poem ‘The book of my enemy has been remaindered’, but do we know he or she is or was a writer, and it very unlikely that he or she was more successful than James, a polymath whose every endeavour was bankable. Yet James’s animus was such that he made the first line of the poem the title of his penultimate collection, and the pleasure he got writing it is palpable in the opening stanza:

The book of my enemy has been remaindered/And I am pleased/ In vast quantities it has been remaindered/ Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized

The rest is as cruel as it is funny. But if its subject is still alive he or she will have the consolation of having something which James, who was more than anything else an entertainer, would have valued more highly than any literary award: The last laugh.