After a lifetime of Labor membership I find the party no longer represents my values

Protesters clash with mounted police outside the defence expo in Melbourne. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

I’m a life member of the Labor Party and the party has been a big part of my life.

When I joined as a teenager I’d been an apprentice mechanic but aspired to a different career. The Whitlam government gave me the opportunity to become the first in my family to attend university, where I obtained a law degree, then practised as a barrister.

I was a member of the Victorian parliament from 2002 to 2010, serving as parliamentary secretary for industry and innovation and cabinet secretary. In my inaugural speech, I said “programs and policies (have) changed to meet changing times, but what never changed for me was the faith in progressive Labor policies that could enable people, regardless of their background or means, to achieve their full potential”, with government having “a vital role to ensure equal opportunity and economic prosperity. Belief in these ideals inspired me to join the Labor Party.”

Concepts such as equal opportunity and equal treatment under law form part of the Western Enlightenment that enabled the greatest period of progress in human history. For those born here and for generations of migrants, they’ve given us the confidence to believe in a better future.

Maintenance of these principles, and the liberal democracy that is their political expression, requires a willingness to defend the values that underpin them and a social consensus that they are worth preserving.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at a vigil in Melbourne on October 7 on the first anniversary of the Hamas attacks in Israel. Picture: Ian Currie/NewsWire

The Australian Labor Party I joined viscerally understood these things, but my faith in Labor’s commitment to this social consensus and its willingness to defend these principles has been eroding. The party is now captive to the ideology of identity politics, which has spread from the universities into most social institutions. Far from supporting Enlightenment values, identity politics teaches that our culture is inherently racist and oppressive. A mainstream political party must push back against this and defend our values. Labor increasingly is failing to do this.

Signs that our values weren’t being defended were emerging at events such as citizenship ceremonies when I was a member of parliament. Migrants who had just become Australian citizens invariably were told their culture would enrich ours. Apart from being advised they now had the right to vote and that Australia was a welcoming, multicultural country, little was said about the importance of upholding the values of the country they had just sworn allegiance to. Successful multicultur­alism involves cultural expression within a unifying national culture, not a collection of separate societies living in the one state.

Labor governments more recently have played a big role in pushing identity politics through the bureaucracy. After my time in parliament, I was a statutory tribunal member and witnessed the growing torrent of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, unconscious bias training, cultural safety awareness courses and innumerable visibility days.

In my position I wasn’t forced to put preferred pronouns on my email signature. Public servants aren’t so fortunate. Rainbow lanyards, expanded to colours beyond the rainbow, are virtually mandatory. Gushing emails announcing the arrival of a new batch of lanyards and pronoun badges are commonplace.

Lanyards may seem trivial, but they’re symptomatic of the way identity ideology becomes normalised in our institutions and entrenched in our laws. Legal cases should be decided on the evidence while treating parties equally, but laws are being passed requiring things like a person’s culture, indigeneity or gender to be taken into account in decision making.

Treating certain people preferentially offends the principle of equal justice. None of this is to say the law shouldn’t take people’s relevant personal circumstances into account. This is normal and proper. What’s different is treating certain people’s characteristics as relevant and decisive, treating parties differently and giving rise to an appearance of bias.

Identity politics divides people, subverts the principle of equal rights and replaces it with a hierarchy of rights. This type of thinking led Labor down the path to the failed voice referendum.

Agree with it or not, the voice undeniably was designed to give a class of people rights and privileges not available to anyone else. The process was outsourced, under the doctrine of self-determination, so the government was unable and unwilling to interfere, modify the wording or explain to the people how the voice would work.

Captive to identity politics, unable to defend our values and fearful of bleeding more votes to the Greens, Labor was in a weakened state if called on to respond to, let alone prevent, a serious social crisis. That crisis struck immediately after October 7.

I have a personal stake in this issue. My partner and our children are Jewish. I’m a Zionist as I believe in the right of the Jews to a national home in their ancestral land. I co-chaired the Parliamentary Friends of Israel group in the Victorian parliament and have visited the country many times. The shock of October 7 caused age-old Jewish feelings of insecurity to resurface. Shock became despair with the realisation that many on the progressive left sided with the terrorists.

Former Victorian Labor MP Tony Lupton.

My faith in Labor was battered when the government’s response effectively abandoned the Jewish community, which is small in number, unlike the larger Muslim community that is heavily concentrated in Labor seats.

Alignment of political Islam, identity politics and craven vote-chasing determined Labor’s response to a war thousands of kilometres away. In the moment of crisis Labor equivocated, failed to show moral leadership and facilitated the rise in anti-Semitism and social division we have witnessed.

This occurred because the Albanese government’s dominant message has been warning and lecturing Israel about its responsibilities while virtually ignoring the Islamist barbarians responsible for the ongoing fighting. This has empowered extremists in our midst and enabled shocking anti-Semitism to emerge in Australia.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong nearly always ignores the fact there is a war going on, being fought by a democratic state against terrorists hiding behind and among their own population. While we would all wish there were no casualties in war, what is unacceptable is a government minister attacking an ally attempting to defend itself honourably against an organisation without any regard for human life.

Calls for social cohesion don’t cut it when those responsible for division aren’t named. Those of us who are not out on the streets opposing Israel’s defensive war and spouting anti-Semitism don’t need to be lectured on social cohesion. The Prime Minister should visit some mosques to denounce anti-Semitism and its perpetrators, without mentioning Islamophobia. Appeasement doesn’t work. It only increases the demands. Look at Muslim Votes Matter.

Australia faces this crisis because we now have a hierarchy of rights that sits in a moral vacuum. The rights of those who wish to go about their daily life free from harassment and abuse, to attend university or enjoy musical concerts without being subjected to protest speeches are disregarded.

I’m greatly saddened that the party I’ve supported all my life is failing this test, but the bigger issue now is the fate of our liberal democracy. Labor needs to find the strength of character to restore our faith and steer the country and its institutions back to the unifying principles it once stood for.

Tony Lupton was the Victorian state Labor member for Prahran, 2002-10.