Joe Hildebrand: Peaceful and pragmatic Aussies rejected hate and outrage at election

The great lost lesson from the election is, as a peaceful and pragmatic people, we don’t want hate and outrage – and that is what makes us the greatest country on earth, writes Joe Hildebrand.

On the night of Saturday, May 3, hundreds of the Labor faithful gathered inside the Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL, wildly agog at the waterfall of seats cascading towards them.

Meanwhile outside, a much smaller and decidedly more miserable group of people stood on the footpath opposite shouting “shame” and “genocide” and the like.

I hadn’t even noticed them on the way in and barely noticed them on the way out. But four weeks on, as the fallout from the incredible result continues, it has just occurred to me that this was perhaps the most telling moment of the campaign.

Amid all the ugliness of the Israel-Palestine conflict that was brought to bear in an Australian election, no one and nothing was more hated by activists and advocates on both sides than the Albanese government.

In part, this was simply because it was the government – and as such was the source of discontent for anyone with a grievance about the way of the world. But it was also more visceral because it was Labor.

Leftist hardliners were furious about what they saw as the ALP betraying their Palestinian cause du jour, and conservatives were convinced the closet socialists in Labor were abandoning Israel.

Pro-Palestine activists gather at Town Hall to protest the NSW Labor Party Conference last July. Picture: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

New Muslim movements sprang up in safe Labor seats vowing to destroy the government and were aided in their attempts to do so by the Greens. Those seats soon appeared unsafe in more ways than one.

Meanwhile, Labor’s most senior Jewish MP was all but booed offstage at a Jewish summit because of the government’s perceived failure to combat anti-Semitism in the community.

For many one-eyed activists on the left, including those bleating across the road from Labor’s victory party, the election was supposed to be a referendum on Gaza. The fact that it was a victory party is a clue to how that referendum went.

Since then, the obliteration of the Greens, the decimation of the Liberals and the immolation of the Coalition have all consumed the headlines and the Israel-Palestine inferno has been reduced to the backburner.

And this is perhaps the great untold story of this historic election result. A story, like the great sitcom Seinfeld, about nothing.

Hardline Muslim and left-wing activists tried to inject anger and hatred into this campaign – or, at the very least, were desperate to fuel outrage.

A Pro-Palestine protest outside the Marrickville electoral office of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in March, 2024. Picture: X

This was overwhelmingly directed at Labor, whose MPs had their electorate offices blockaded and vandalised and whose campaign materials were burnt and daubed with blood-red paint.

Jewish groups were also by turns furious and frustrated with the government – although their anger never descended into such actions.

And yet relentlessly besieged by both sides on this most hot-blooded of issues, Labor emerged with a record majority.

So what does this tell us?

Clearly it tells us nothing about Australians’ support for one side of the conflict or the other. The very fact that both sides saw the government as supporting the opposite side is proof enough of that.

On the contrary, it tells us that Australians simply did not want this incredibly complex, divisive and dangerous debate on our electoral radar.

We did not want to choose sides or vote for or against it. We wanted to vote on our own struggles here at home, not foreign struggles on the other side of the world.

And this is something that those same one-eyed activists and ideologues always fail to see. Perhaps no-eyed would be a better description.

We are indeed the lucky country, however pejorative that term may have been when it was coined – admittedly by the sort of people who use the word “pejorative”.

Unlike Israel and Palestine, we have never been beset by civil war and we see no need to import it.

By contrast, we are the most successful multicultural nation on earth.

Whatever challenges we have among different ethnicities or religions, our mild squabbles and skirmishes put Europe and Asia, the Americas and Africa to shame.

And while we still struggle to bridge the gap between our Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, there are few – perhaps apart from Lidia Thorpe – who would argue this is grounds for arson, let alone armed conflict.

That is the great lost lesson from the election. We just don’t want that shit. We are a peaceful and pragmatic people.

And that is what makes us the greatest country on earth.

Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: Peaceful and pragmatic Aussies rejected hate and outrage at election