Former US President John F Kennedy understood the importance of resolute action in times of challenge.
"There are risks and costs to action,'' Kennedy once said. "But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction''.
There is a lesson here for Scott Morrison: true leadership is about stepping up to responsibility.
Mr Morrison's three years as Prime Minister have been characterised by inaction and inertia.
It's always a case of too little, too late.
When presented with a problem, his first instinct is to ignore it or deny its existence. Then, when the problem becomes a crisis, he blames others.
Finally, when Australians suffer the consequences of his inaction, he rewrites history to avoid blame. He just won't take responsibility.
Mr Morrison's focus is not action, but political management, a pattern of behaviour demonstrated across a range of issues.
Take the 2019/20 Black Summer Bushfires.
As the bushfire season approached, 23 former fire chiefs and scientists warned Mr Morrison of the approaching danger and urged him to boost the nation's aerial firefighting capacity.
The Prime Minister did nothing.
These fires tragically took 33 lives and burnt 24 million hectares of land.
The Prime Minister's response was to blame state governments and tour firegrounds looking for photo opportunities.
When the COVID pandemic exploded early last year, other countries wasted no time in approaching drug companies to make advance orders for vaccines that were still under development.
Mr Morrison did not act. And when Pfizer approached our Government about its vaccine in July, there was still no sense of urgency.
He finally signed a Pfizer vaccine deal in November, boasting he had guaranteed Australia was at "the front of the queue''.
This was never true.
In fact, by that time we signed up, Pfizer had signed contacts to deliver more than one billion doses to 34 other nations. From our position, we could not even see the front of the queue.
This serious failure is the key reason the majority of Australians are in COVID lockdown today.
If Mr Morrison had done his job, many more Australians would have been vaccinated and life would be returning to normal in this country, as it is overseas.
Instead, too many Australians are sick with COVID. We can't go to work. Children cannot attend school. And our economy is losing hundreds of millions of dollars a day.
Quarantine represents another failure by Mr Morrison.
Quarantine is a Federal responsibility.
But when the pandemic commenced, state governments turned hotels into quarantine centres to isolate people arriving in Australia from overseas. This was meant to be a temporary solution.
Since then COVID has broken out of quarantine hotels at least 27 times.
The big breakout in Melbourne in May and June came from hotel quarantine in Adelaide.
And the current NSW crisis happened after an unvaccinated limousine driver contracted the virus when driving a foreign air crew to hotel quarantine.
Hotels were built for tourists.
Mr Morrison has had more nearly 18 months to created fit-for-purpose purpose quarantine facilities. But he has not yet dug a hole despite promises of facilities in Melbourne and Brisbane. Instead, our only alternative to hotel quarantine is the use of a worker's camp at Howard Springs, near Darwin.
Yet again, too little, too late.
On climate change the Morrison-Joyce Government has turned inertia into an artform.
After taking office nearly a decade ago, the Coalition wound back the previous Labor Government's carbon reduction measures.
Since then, bitter internal divisions have prevented them from taking meaningful action. After all this time in office, they still have no energy policy.
If Mr Morrison could get his act together, our nation could harness our plentiful supplies of solar and wind power, reducing emissions and slashing power bills, which would allow businesses to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs, including in regional Australia.
But he won't step up.
Just last week, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, asked what plan the Government had to reduce emissions, said it was not his job to come up with a plan.
That's extraordinary.
Mr Morrison also resisted the campaign by veterans and their families for a Royal Commission into suicides among former military personnel.
And he has failed to take serious action in response to allegations that in March 2019, then Liberal Party staffer Brittany Higgins was a victim of sexual assault in the ministerial office of then Defence Minister Linda Reynolds.
The issue sparked a national debate about sexual harassment and sexual assault. But Mr Morrison has done little. All these months later, he has still not been able to justify his claim that despite the alleged assault happening within metres of his own office, no-one told him about it for nearly two years.
The pattern is clear. Mr Morrison never acts on problems until it is too late to make a real difference.
And even then, he won't take responsibility. It's always someone else's fault.
His attitude was best illustrated during the bushfires when he told a radio interviewer: "I don't hold a hose, mate''.
Australians require better leadership.
Too little, too late just doesn't cut it.
Anthony Albanese is the Leader of the Australian Labor Party
