Piers Akerman: Penny Wong and Anthony Albanese cave in to terrorism and moronic students
Labor voters who still support the Albanese government’s flaccid foreign policy are turning their back on the compassionate, worldly legacy of the party’s greatest leaders, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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Labor voters who still support the Albanese government’s flaccid foreign policy are turning their back on the compassionate, worldly legacy of Labor’s greatest leaders, Ben Chifley and Bob Hawke.
Under Chifley, Australia was at the forefront in the Western world’s near universal decision to support the foundation of a modern Jewish state after the horrors of the Holocaust. Herbert Vere “Doc” Evatt was Australia’s signatory at the birth of the UN declaration in October 1945.
Evatt, the Australian external affairs minister and chairman of the UN Special Committee, recommended the establishment of an independent Jewish state in the British mandate Palestine, together with a neighbouring independent Arab state, and this was endorsed by the UN General Assembly in November 1947. Evatt’s most capable assistant was Paul Hasluck, later to become a Liberal MP, and minister in the Menzies government from 1951 to 1969 when he was appointed governor-general.
The Evatt-Hasluck relationship, though sometimes fractious, stands as a beacon in the long history of Australia’s bipartisan support for Israel. Hawke, a huge admirer of Israel’s achievements in the face of universal hostility from Islamic nations, counted Israeli PMs Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin as friends.
After Israel defended itself in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he warned: “If the bell tolls for Israel, it won’t just toll for Israel, it will toll for all mankind.” That prescient quote is as relevant today as it was half a century ago.
The Albanese government, however, honours this more often in the breach than in any substance as its contemptible UN vote against Israel’s survival demonstrated.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong is no Evatt or Hasluck. Both men had years of scholarship behind them and the lived experiences of the Depression and World War II. Wong brought an adolescent undergraduate activist’s view to the job.
In backing the corrupt Palestinian Authority’s UN bid, the government has caved into terrorism and stupid student activism.
Albanese’s defence of Labor’s stance on Israel has been a “farrago of fantasy, falsity and outright fiction”, to borrow a line from former High Court justice Sir Victor Windeyer’s observation of the fabricated Document J in the Petrov royal commission. Hamasattacked civilians at a concert and families living near the Gaza border last October 7, with more than 3000 terrorists and waves of Gazans murdering 1163 people. Hamas is not seeking peace with Israel. Its charter demands the annihilation of all Israelis “from the river to the sea”.
That’s the genocidal chant that moronic students disrupting the education of thousands at our taxpayer-funded universities and at leading US and UK campuses cheer. It’s the same phrase used by Labor senator Fatima Payman when she broke ranks with some in the ALP to attack Israel’s attempts to eliminate Hamas in Gaza. Australia Palestine Advocacy Network president Nasser Mashni praised Senator Payman at a Melbourne University protest, much as Hamas had applauded Australia’s UN vote.
Albanese’s limp response has been to say the phrase used by the senator and the students is “inappropriate”, a word rendered almost meaningless, conveying no sense of any consequence.
Australians, particularly those who championed Labor’s historical support for the only liberal democracy in the Middle East for the past 70-plus years, can only weep at this trashing of the intellectual, moral and ethical position pledged by Labor on behalf of the nation. The phrase “we must never forget” used after the Armenian genocide of the 1900s, the Holocaust, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre, after the Bali bombings, has gone from Labor’s lexicon. We must never forget.
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