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Peta Credlin: Will Australians wake up to Labor’s sly agenda of radical change?

Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s call for the recognition of Palestine is the latest move by a party that promised before the election to be ‘safe change’ but is now racing to make Australia a very different country, writes Peta Credlin.

Peta Credlin blasts Labor’s ‘appalling pivot’ on Palestinian statehood

Under Labor, Australia’s Middle East policy is being driven less by what is in our country’s national interest and more about their internal fight with the Greens and the growing weight of the Muslim vote in their heartland seats.

In simple terms, values sacrificed for votes sums it up.
Penny Wong’s call last week for the recognition of Palestine threatens seven decades of bipartisan support for Israel as the region’s only liberal democracy; a call that wasn’t rogue, it was fully backed in by Anthony Albanese, we should remember.

Partly, this is a function of the large Middle Eastern Muslim populations in some Sydney and Melbourne Labor strongholds. And partly it is a function of the quasi-Marxist view of Labor activists that Gazans are not the victims of an Islamist terrorist organisation using them as human shields, but of Israeli “settler colonisation”, despite the facts and history.

On this issue, as on so many others, the party that promised before the election to be “safe change” is now racing to make Australia a very different country.

Pro-Palestinian supporters march through Sydney. Picture: David Swift
Pro-Palestinian supporters march through Sydney. Picture: David Swift

Bob Hawke once said: “If the bell tolls for Israel, it won’t just toll for Israel, it will toll for all mankind.” On this issue and others, Labor’s greatest ever leader would hardly recognise his old party.

In the immediate aftermath of the greatest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, senior frontbencher Tony Burke, whose electorate is 27 per cent Muslim, supported a council flying the Palestinian flag, and refused to condemn an Islamic leader who rejoiced in the slaughter of Jews on October 7 atrocities before Israel had fired one shot in retaliation.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong giving her speech calling for the recognition of Palestine. Picture: Rohan Thomson
Foreign Minister Penny Wong giving her speech calling for the recognition of Palestine. Picture: Rohan Thomson

I’m sorry, but there is a world of moral difference between the deliberate slaughter of 1200 civilians, including children and even babies, and the civilian deaths that are unavoidable in urban warfare, especially when one side deliberately places its weaponry under schools and hospitals.

And while it’s understandable that migrant communities would feel a conflict of loyalties, the fact so many Australians of Middle Eastern background seem to favour Hamas over Israel suggests a serious failure of integration.

Who would have imagined, even a year ago, that our cities would now routinely host huge pro-Hamas demonstrations calling for the expulsion of Jews “from the river to the sea” — and much worse from some Islamist preachers — and police would take no action against this hate speech?

But this is far from the only way our country is changing under Labor.

The Prime Minister’s signature project, the constitutionally entrenched Indigenous Voice, might have resoundingly failed with voters, but that isn’t stopping state and federal Labor governments pushing on with measures such as treaties, rewriting our history as a story of shame, and separate justice and child-protection systems that involve different treatment based on race.

So much for Hawke’s bicentenary declaration that Australia had “no hierarchy of descent” and “no privilege of origin”.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (left) and Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen. Picture: Martin Ollman
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (left) and Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen. Picture: Martin Ollman

But this is typical of the green-left activism that’s now entrenched in Labor. As advised in the leftist instruction manual Rules for Radicals, never let democracy derail the long march through institutions.

Does anyone seriously think Aboriginal people not paying land tax, council rates, stamp duty and uni fees (as is on the table in treaty talks in Victoria) will bring people together?

Then there’s the insanity of more consumer subsidies for intermittent renewable power that’s destroying the economics of 24/7 fossil-fuelled baseload power, that’s led not only to taxpayer subsidies for low-income household power bills, but even to subsidies for coal-fired power stations to keep the lights on.

Despite belated warnings from energy bosses such as Alinta’s Jeff Dimery that net zero means “we will all pay more”, Energy Minister Chris Bowen insists we must nearly triple the percentage of renewable power in just six years. When it’s pointed out nearly all new wind turbines and solar panels are imported from China, the government’s only response is a $1bn subsidy for solar-panel manufacturing, even though it’s high-power prices from renewables that’s sending manufacturers bust in this country (and jobs offshore).

The Australian and Aboriginal flags fly side by side outside Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman
The Australian and Aboriginal flags fly side by side outside Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman

Let’s be clear where our country is now headed under Labor: petrol and diesel cars, meat and dairy, and jet travel will be curtailed in order to combat climate change; the only growth industries will be taxpayer-funded ones like the NDIS, or taxpayer-subsided ones like renewable energy; our flag (representing colonialism) will always be partnered by the Aboriginal one; Australia Day because it’s about invasion, and Anzac Day because it’s about militarism, will gradually fade away; and we’ll be a nation of renters rather than owners because sweetheart deals with unions and green rules from councils will make home ownership mostly unattainable.

Paul Keating wasn’t wrong when he said when you change the government, you change the country.

Albanese showed rat-like cunning when he hid the extent of his radical agenda from voters before the last election. Are Australians now waking up or will they vote for more?

Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm

Originally published as Peta Credlin: Will Australians wake up to Labor’s sly agenda of radical change?

Peta Credlin
Peta CredlinColumnist

Peta Credlin AO is a weekly columnist with The Australian, and also with News Corp Australia’s Sunday mastheads, including The Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Herald Sun. Since 2017 she has hosted her successful prime-time program Credlin on Sky News Australia, Monday to Thursday at 6.00pm. For 16 years, Peta was a policy adviser to the Howard government ministers in the portfolios of defence, communications, immigration, and foreign affairs. Between 2009 and 2015, she was chief of staff to Tony Abbott as Leader of the Opposition and later as prime minister. Peta is admitted as a barrister and solicitor in Victoria, with legal qualifications from the University of Melbourne and the Australian National University.

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Original URL: https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/opinion/peta-credlin-will-australians-wake-up-to-labors-sly-agenda-of-radical-change/news-story/51a984345f1dcd96fdb270d774ef0f8a