Labor’s Left backed Trump’s strikes on Iran. It’s not the only issue they’ve shifted on

The first Australian minister to endorse US President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities over the weekend wasn’t the prime minister or foreign minister. It was Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek, who happened to have the 6.45am breakfast TV slot on Monday.

“We do support the strikes and I know the foreign minister [Penny Wong] is going to be on your program later this morning to go into more detail,” Plibersek said dutifully.

Anthony Albanese, Penny Wong and Tanya Plibersek all spoke in support of the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities.Credit: Monique Westermann

The prominent member of Labor’s Left was then joined by two of her factional colleagues, Penny Wong and Anthony Albanese, who reinforced the government’s decision.

It was a far cry from two decades ago, when all three MPs signed a letter to then-US president George W. Bush, protesting against the war in Iraq.

“The ALP firmly believes that international conflict should, wherever possible, be dealt with peacefully and through international co-operation under the auspices of the United Nations,” reads the letter, which Plibersek delivered personally to Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, during the president’s visit to Australia in 2004. “When all attempts for a peaceful resolution have been exhausted, United Nations sanction is vital if force is to be used.

“What is to prevent other countries from following the example of our attack on Iraq, and arguing the right to preventive self-defence? Why shouldn’t North and South Korea attack each other using the template we developed in Iraq? Or India and Pakistan?

“The precedent we have set is a very dangerous one, and there is every indication that the world will become less safe, not more, because of our actions.”

Yet when Albanese endorsed Trump’s strike on Iran, without ever saying that the country was on the cusp of producing a nuclear weapon, no one in his parliamentary party publicly complained. Some Left faction MPs contacted by this masthead even refused to grouse privately.

The Iran of 2025 is very different to the Iraq of 2004, as are the demands on Australia in each case, but the Left’s apparent quiescence has outraged the old guard of the faction.

Former Labor senator Doug Cameron, once the national secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union that gave Albanese his power base in NSW, has repeatedly posted barrages of criticism (“unconvincing”, “depressing”) at his old colleagues in government.

“The unequivocal support for Trump’s illegal attacks on Iran is reprehensible and demonstrates that the pathetic AUKUS agreement has subjugated our national sovereignty and moral compass to the USA,” he wrote on X on June 23. “Time for Labor backbenchers to speak up.”

But his message may as well have gone into the void. None on the Left uttered a critical word.

Labor’s recent federal election victory was immense. It now holds 94 seats, more than it ever has. It won seats off both the Coalition and the Greens. And the Left is so dominant that it won control of the party’s national conference for the first time in four decades and wrested ministries from the Right after the May election.

Yet the faction has gone quiet.

The Iran strikes aren’t the first issue on which the Left has shifted. It waved through the AUKUS deal, didn’t revolt over the government’s aborted gambling reforms, and has barely made a noise about Albanese’s intervention to scrap a deal with the Greens to legislate stronger environmental protections. Mandatory minimum sentences for terror offences, which go against Labor’s formal party platform, went through parliament without a fight.

Bill Kelty, a titan of the labour movement who led the Australian Council of Trade Unions in the 1990s, says the entire notion of the Left as an ideological force within Labor no longer makes sense.

“Is there a left-wing view of the Middle East?” Kelty asks. “It’s best to concede the truth, [the Left] doesn’t exist for public policy purposes, it exists for allocating seats and getting representation.

“It’s a delusion to think they exist at all.”

Labour movement stalwart Bill Kelty says of Labor’s Left faction, “it’s a delusion to think they exist at all”.Credit: Justin McManus

But Kelty, who remains connected in Labor and business circles, won’t say why the Left has changed. “There might be a whole lot of reasons,” he says.

Other commentators have offered no shortage of those reasons: the rise of the Greens taking radical voices away from Labor, the ideological dislocation of the Hawke-Keating years, electoral losses under leaders who opposed war or offered expansive policy programs, such as Simon Crean and Bill Shorten, the difficulty of a faction defying a prime minister who is one of its members, and a surge in professional politicians who prioritise dealmaking over protest.

The Left, in a clear demonstration of the premium it places on unity and a disciplined message, will not defend itself publicly. Sharon Claydon, a Newcastle MP and the faction’s formal convenor, declined to comment.

But there is another view in Labor ranks that the Left has won a practical victory from its rhetorical loss. Albanese’s declaration of support for Trump’s decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear site, Left-aligned sources say, was nothing like John Howard’s commitment to follow the US into Iraq, despite superficial similarities.

No Australian soldiers will invade Iran. No Australian planes or bases aided the American strike. Australia’s support was tersely worded, avoided claiming the attack aligned with international law or was justified by the risk of an imminent Iranian bomb and came only after the attack had happened.

Yet that purely rhetorical support, Albanese’s defenders note, diffused a potential attack on the government for splitting with Australia’s crucial defence partner at a time when China is on the rise.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley, for example, offered only oblique criticism in response. “Now is a time for Australia to stand with the United States, and Anthony Albanese should be taking every opportunity to do so,” she said.

Albanese is clearly confident his approach is working. “In a time of significant global uncertainty,” the prime minister told the National Press Club in early June, the prescription for successful left-wing government is to “deliver on urgent necessities” at home and play a “stabilising … role” abroad. “Our destiny”, he told this masthead’s Inside Politics podcast in May, is “to try to be the natural party of government”.

Political historian Paul Strangio, who is an emeritus professor at Monash University, says people who forecast a livelier debate within Labor on policy questions because of its expanded ranks after the election are likely to be disappointed.

“Some might feel more liberated,” Strangio says. “But going on the quiescent reaction to the government endorsing the US strikes, it doesn’t seem so.”

The loudest voice carrying on the radical nationalist tradition that values a uniquely Australian path in world affairs, which Strangio says was once a defining attribute of the Left, now comes from one of the faction’s old enemies. “If that exists now, the person who most embodies it is Paul Keating, who was the scourge of the Left in the 1990s,” he says. “I’m not saying he’s ideologically changed, but the party has changed and that’s the limb he’s now out on.”

Strangio, who has written books on Labor in Victoria and radical Whitlam government minister Jim Cairns, says there have been some benefits from Labor’s unity.

“You achieve things from the government benches,” he says. Where parts of the Coalition have become more doctrinaire on things like opposing net zero emissions and criticising Welcome to Country ceremonies, Strangio says Labor has been able to occupy the centre of Australian politics. “It’s almost like they’ve swapped clothes in some ways,” he says.

But it has come at a cost, he says, echoing Kelty. He cannot imagine someone like Cairns staying silent on AUKUS or the Middle East. “Good governments have to have contrary voices, and there’s a danger when people hold their tongue too much,” he says. “So there’s a balance to be struck and we’ve veered one way, in my view.”

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