The Albanese government’s response to the anti-Semitic crisis has been feeble

It is increasingly likely that if Labor loses the election this crisis will have a lot to do with it.

If you had asked us two and a half years ago to name the issue most likely to be Albo’s undoing I reckon most pundits would have said the cost of living or the growing divide between Labor’s inner city activist base and the more conservative outer suburbs.

Others might have picked the threat to the economy from spiking energy prices.

If you’d entered an Albo Doomsday Cup sweep back then you’d have been forgiven for throwing away your ticket on the spot if you’d drawn “Failure to get on top of an explosion of anti-Semitism”.

But here we are in 2025 and somehow a country which throughout its history has thought – complacently as it turns out – that anti-Semitism is a foreign disease to which we are largely immune has had to confront evidence this is not so.

Anthony Albanese is failing to get on top of an explosion of anti-Semitism. Picture: Martin Ollman

As a grim jest last week a member of the Jewish community sent me a collection of social media posts from Albo and his ministers over the past 15 months in which they have solemnly informed us “there is no place” for anti-Semitism in Australia even as attacks on the Jewish community have escalated.

How many of them can be blamed on the feeble response of Albanese and his ministers is debatable.

Had the federal and state governments cracked down quickly on overt displays of Jew hatred, we might not be where we are today.

There is no way of knowing.

Whether things might have been different doesn’t detract however from the fact that the government’s response has been feeble.

And with the number of anti-Semitic incidents growing daily it is increasingly likely that if Labor loses the election this crisis will have a lot to do with it.

The first reason for this is it has exposed a weakness of Albo’s which has become more and more apparent the longer he has been in office – his tendency to ignore things he doesn’t want to talk about.

At first, after the excitement of the Rudd-Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison years it was a relief to have a PM who didn’t rush to the Blue Room at the first sign of trouble.

But whatever charm this performance held has long since fled and in 2025 his continual refusal to rise to the events, either in rhetoric or action, just seems slack.

It doesn’t help that it turns out his carefully curated public image, the vinyl-collecting craft-beer lover in the Radio Birdman T-shirt, which back in 2022 seemed cute, just looks wimpy when contrasted with Peter Dutton’s hardman Queensland copper act.

The other danger this crisis poses to the government is the way it is contributing to a growing sense that community safety isn’t what it was.

Now in reality, crime is of course a state issue which pollsters say people in focus groups will, if pushed, admit.

But while voters might understand this on an intellectual level, they are, I suspect, apt to forget it when the general impression of what is happening around the country – home invasions, the firebombing of smoke shops, the ongoing Palestinian protests and now the wave of crimes against Jews – is a growing disorder, which love him or hate him, just wasn’t there when Scott Morrison was running things.

Albanese looks wimpy when contrasted with Peter Dutton’s hardman Queensland copper act. Picture: Martin Ollman

In this too the contrast between Albo and the opposition leader couldn’t be more to the Prime Minister’s disadvantage. The point is not whether Dutton would in the real world be any better at handling the law and order situation, the point is he looks like someone who would be better at handling it than a Marrickville cavoodle owner.

In fact whether, or to be charitable, exactly how, Dutton would be better at handling this crisis is an open question as we saw from his interview on the ABC’s Insiders on Sunday.

Asked by interviewer David Speers what he would do to stop the anti-Semitic attacks around Australia, as you would expect he went hard on Albo’s weak performance since October which had “allowed people to believe that there was no red line that could be crossed and there’s no consequence”.

But in answer to the question, all he could offer was “there should be zero tolerance, that there should be mandatory sentencing for people convicted of terrorist offences, and that I would have absolutely no tolerance, and I would convey that in the most certain terms to the AFP Commissioner and ASIO and the other agencies to stamp it out.”

Fair enough on the sentencing I suppose, if you think that would act as a deterrent, but the rest of it?

It sounded to me like he’d huff and he’d puff and he’d … I dunno … tweet there’s no place for anti-Semitism in Australia.