‘Divide and conquer’ key to Anthony Albanese’s class warfare

From tax cuts to Gaza and the voice, Anthony Albanese wants revolution not evolution.

You don’t have to be a dewy-eyed romanticist about the past to believe that in the past year Australia has become angrier and more divided than we can ever recall.

The evidence is everywhere. White versus black, rich versus poor, women versus men, women versus trans, and every other schism one can imagine yawns wider than it ever did. For some, this is not only deliberate but necessary. And, indeed, a damn good thing. You can’t have a revolution without conflict.

However, because Marxist conflict theory and old notions about class warfare are discredited everywhere in Australia (except in our law schools and other radical corners of our universities), it is not politically astute to advertise that you are deliberately stoking conflict. As an instrument of statecraft, inciting and capitalising on division is a decidedly old-fashioned and brutish concept. That is why the Albanese government is polishing its messages to hide its intent. Pull the curtain aside, and its modern political platform is deeply rooted in class, race and gender wars.

While superficially playing a neutral and reassuring game, this government believes Australia is broken and needs radical change, which can only be achieved after, and as a result of, significant conflict. Like its tax policies, none of this was advertised at the 2022 election.

Because most Australians think Australia is basically a pretty good place, which only needs incremental rather than revolutionary change, a political party that wants to make major change must hide that from the voting public.

The voice was a classic example. The government tried to tell mainstream Australia this was a minor change, a simple matter of good manners. It did so even though those drafting the words were saying the opposite. Though the government did fail miserably in its constitutional quest, the ugly and bitter campaign did achieve one of its goals; by stirring up anger and division, it energised activists to intensify their fight.

The most rancorous Australia Day in history is testament to that. The aim of activists is to make Australia Day so contentious it will have to be abandoned. Predictably, those who want to mark Australia Day are not taking this lying down. Peter Dutton’s call for a boycott of Woolworths for its apparent abandonment of Australia Day is in fact reactive – he is simply channelling the anger many feel about the activists.

Moreover, it’s likely that dialling up the rhetoric against Australia Day – with local councils refusing to hold citizenship ceremonies and Tennis Australia refusing to mark Australia Day – will simply generate much more heat and light without effecting any substantive change.

Success by the activists will simply perpetuate the division. If a new Australia Day is chosen, the anger of those unhappy with the change will be directed to changing the new date. Division will become permanent.

A particularly repulsive new form of division has emerged from the grisly merger between the Indigenous sovereignty movement and the pro-Palestine movement. Anthony Albanese cannot wash his hands of what he has wrought. By stoking the “always was, always will be” claims about ownership of Australian land he made it inevitable this particular narrative of colonial dispossession would merge with claims that Israel too is a colonial power. The “always was, always will be” crowd have joined in conflict with the “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” brigade.

As if we weren’t divided enough about Gaza with every conceivable group from the LGBTQ Mardi Gras to the ABC violently split, now we are told to view Gaza through the prism of colonialism and dispossession. When virtually every event in human history is explained by some variant of oppressor/oppressed analysis, and everyone is allocated to one or other of those buckets, it is any wonder we find more and more reasons to divide ourselves up into warring groups?

Mind you, this division into oppressor and oppressed can bring benefits to some members of the allegedly oppressed. Indeed, some members of these groups become the new privileged, immune from criticism or punishment no matter how badly they behave.

For example, until this newspaper exposed the death threats made by Indigenous cultural adviser Ian Brown against white project manager Rochelle Hicks, it appeared Brown’s Indigeneity gave him immunity from the normal legal consequences of his actions.

At the ABC, impartiality rules don’t seem to cover the work of Indigenous affairs editor Bridget Brennan.

In her Australia Day news report, she announced that the country “always was and always will be Aboriginal land”. After the Prime Minister released proposed words for the voice in July 2022, Brennan appeared on ABC’s Insiders panel telling Australians the voice must include reparations. These are the demands of an activist stoking division, not an impartial journalist.

Under this government, class warfare – the forerunner of the kinds of conflict theories that drive colonialism, race and gender wars – remains a critical part of its political playbook.

Anthony – “my word is my bond” – Albanese has reneged on the stage three tax cuts in favour of “divide and conquer” class war politics. The PM is effectively saying, without a hint of shame, that it is fine for him to break the promise that was crucial to winning the 2022 election because it enables him to take from the rich to give to the poor.

You can ignore the PM’s cries of “we had no alternative”. Reneging on stage three was a deliberate choice of one preferred policy among a large number of options. If the PM wanted to provide more cost-of-living relief while still keeping the tax cuts, there would have been many ways to fund it. Spending cuts or deferrals of environmental or industrial policy would be but a few of the obvious ways for him to have kept his promise on stage three while still funding cost-of-living relief.

No, the real reason the PM broke his promise is that he is still “fighting Tories”. Class warfare, it would seem, justifies any dishonesty in the PM’s world.

Wedded to identity politics, the Albanese government is going to war on many fronts, knowingly fermenting division while apparently promising to fix society. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, for example, has released discussion papers aimed at dramatically skewing the law on sexual assault.

Everything is on the table, it would seem, from specialist courts with suitable attitudes, to re-education camps for lawyers involved in this work, to the abandonment of trial by jury in favour of some method of adjudication that will ensure more convictions.

Everything is being considered, it would seem, except for any consideration of the rights of accused persons. They are apparently expendable. Mere roadkill in the path of the new conviction-focused juggernaut.

A successful, peaceful country needs values that unite us. Australians have shown time and again they have no time for class warfare, or warfare based on race, gender or any other form of identity politics. This is why the ALP has spent so little time in office federally since World War II. However, it explains why this Labor government wants to do as much as it can as quickly as it can while it still has a House of Representatives majority and a favourable Senate. It wants revolution not evolution, and is prepared to stoke division to get there. What it needs to remember though is that revolutions have a nasty habit of eating their own.