Chris Minns has emerged as Labor’s strongest voice against rising anti-Semitism and the hijacking of pro-Palestine protests by extremists and left-wing activists to attack Jewish people and Israel.
The NSW Premier is displaying leadership and clear messaging that Anthony Albanese and his federal colleagues have struggled with. Albanese’s failure to maintain consistency and unity across caucus on Israel-Hamas is fuelling messy division inside federal Labor ranks.
The federal government should look to Minns’s strength in tightening laws to clamp down on threats and incitement of violence based on race or religion, and directing NSW police to pick-up their game and target ugly anti-Semitic scenes that most Australians find abhorrent.
The shutdown of the “pro-Palestine” protest at Port Botany and arrest of 23 activists sends a signal to those seeking to manipulate the Middle East conflict that police will not turn a blind eye to criminal behaviour and hate speech.
Any protest that seeks to disrupt Australia’s ports and damage the national economy must be met with a heavy hand.
“You can’t have a situation where NSW ports are being blocked. This would have huge economic and reputational damage for our state and for our country. You can’t be in a situation where … we’ve got a trading partner who is an ally of Australia who’s blocked from having commerce in our country. That’s never been the case,” Minns declared.
“I didn’t see (these protesters) blocking the port in relation to issues with countries in Asia or other countries in the Middle East. But if there’s going to be laws that are broken, NSW police are going to arrest people in order to keep public safety.”
Albanese, who last week sought to strengthen his language under attack by Peter Dutton in parliament, regularly links Islamophobia with anti-Semitism, despite the latter being a dominant factor shattering social cohesion in Sydney and Melbourne.
The mealy-mouthed doublespeak we’ve heard from senior Labor MPs is driven by the worst kind of politics. They are worried about western Sydney seats with high populations of Islamic voters, and concerned about inner-city seats targeted by pro-Palestine, anti-Israel Greens.
Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke – whose seat of Watson boasts one of the nation’s highest number of Islamic voters – on Wednesday said he was “wary” of pro-Palestine protests descending into anti-Semitism but wanted deaths to end in Gaza.
“I’m always wary of where some protests can morph or ignite in different ways into anti-Semitism. I’m always very wary of protests of that nature. But let me say this, the view of the community that I represent, they want the deaths to stop. That’s what they want,” he said.
Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones defended Albanese’s condemnation of Hamas: “I don’t think there’s been any lack of moral clarity, any lack of condemnation. The entire Albanese Labor government condemns anti-Semitism with equal force. We condemn Islamophobia. We are capable in this country of saying we condemn anti-Islamic and anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish sentiments … There is no place for either of those sentiments.”
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