On foreign policy, Penny Wong is letting Australia down
Every politician brings a style and a set of strengths to the office they hold.
Mostly, a political leader’s style is aligned with their principles and values and hopefully their competence and policies. If not – to use the words of the old Labor fixer Graham Richardson – the mob will always work you out.
Over the past year we have seen an unravelling of Australia’s foreign policy and a serious questioning about the judgment of Foreign Minister Penny Wong.
Her performance and record are at odds with the perceptions Australians have of Wong and the promises made by Labor before the 2022 election.
The fact is Australians like Wong and want her to succeed. She has formed a reputation over two decades: a trailblazer noted for her intellect, her toughness – a warrior of the Labor’s hard-Left faction.
But for such a political professional her performance as Foreign Minister has been marred by missteps. Under her stewardship, Australia’s foreign policy has lurched away from our allies and our longstanding values.
Traditionally, there has been little difference in foreign policy between the two major parties. That has been to Australia’s advantage, with neighbours, friends and allies seeing Australia as a trusted and predictable partner.
Previous foreign ministers, both Labor and Liberal, understood Australia’s place in the pantheon of nations.
We are a Western liberal democracy. We believe in the rules-based order and we stand for the human dignity of all citizens.
Traditionally, regardless of who has been in power, we have stood with other democracies against tyranny.
But we have seen a fraying of this Australian consensus on many fronts.
The first and most obvious is in relation to Israel.
Before the 2022 election, senior Labor figures wrote in The Australian Jewish News that there would be no difference between Labor and the Coalition in terms of support for Israel. We can now call that an out-and-out lie.
A year before the October 7 terrorist attacks Penny Wong, in a ham-fisted move, changed Australia’s policy on Jerusalem as the capital of Israel without pre-notifying Israel or consulting with interested domestic stakeholders and the Jewish community.
This decision was applauded by the terrorist organisations Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
As well, Labor restored funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East – an organisation whose employees and headquarters were subsequently involved in the October 7 terrorist attacks – and changed Australia’s voting position on Israel at the UN.
Then amid the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks, when Israelis were still identifying raped, burned and disfigured bodies of their relatives and while the search was on for hundreds of missing people, Wong had the temerity to lecture Israel about exercising restraint.
At the time, I publicly said on Chris Kenny’s Sky News program that I thought Wong had a “blind spot” when it came to Israel.
Sadly, over the past 15 months I have been proven right.
But I’ve realised Wong has more than a blind spot about Israel; she has a lack of faith in the values of the West. It’s why when Wong visited London she used the occasion to lecture the British on colonialism, notwithstanding the great British democratic architecture that is the foundation of modern Australia.
Not only did she offend her hosts, she totally played into the Chinese argument that AUKUS is an “Anglo-Saxon clique”. This lack of faith in our shared Western values has meant the Foreign Minister has been consistently and openly hostile to the only democracy in the Middle East.
Since October 7, Wong has continued to instruct her diplomats to vote for one-sided resolutions that put Australia at odds with our most important strategic ally, the US. She has continued to call for premature ceasefires that would leave Hamas in place and able to regroup and rearm, despite more than 100 hostages remaining under its control.
If the Israelis had listened to Wong’s calls for ceasefires, terrorist leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah would still be in place.
Later she lectured democratic Israel and lumped it in the same boat as autocracies Russia and China
Alongside this, Wong still has not clarified Labor’s position on whether Australia would arrest visiting Israelis, including their Prime Minister named in the highly criticised International Criminal Court warrants.
And when Wong finally visited Israel she refused to go to the sites of the massacres – the kibbutzes in the south and the Nova Music festival – to see for herself the terrible tragedy of what had occurred.
These sites have been visited by world leaders including Peter Dutton. But not Wong. Imagine a foreign minister going to the US in the wake of September 11 and not visiting ground zero.
Such is the quiet contempt in which Wong holds our democratic ally and partner Israel.
If you think that treatment can’t get worse, well, it does. She has treated the Israeli ambassador with greater disdain than she treated officials of the Chinese Communist Party after the People’s Liberation Army fired flare and solar pulses in the direction of Australian Defence Force personnel.
Her anger in reprimanding Israel for its war with terrorist organisation Hezbollah, which had been attacking Israel with rockets every day, contrasted with the silence over CCP actions that endangered Australians.
Every day, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade under its minister prosecutes an anti-Israel agenda ranging from decisions on visas to votes at the UN.
As well, Wong has been timid or silent when it comes to the despicable words and actions of the Iranian ambassador on Australian soil. Frankly, it’s time to send him packing.
Even on the other frontline in the battle for Western civilisation in Ukraine, the government has dragged its heels.
Under the Morrison government, Australia was the largest non-NATO contributor to Ukraine. Under Wong, Australia chose not to provide Taipan helicopters and other military equipment that Ukraine requested. And her government rejected repeated requests to ship our coal to help keep Ukraine’s power supplies running.
Apparently there is more purity with Labor’s inner-city faction if it lets Ukrainians freeze, rather than keep them alive through winter with coal.
It also took well over two years for Wong to reopen our embassy in Ukraine even though Canada and 70 other nations had reopened their embassies before Australia.
As importantly, she has shown no interest in fixing the haemorrhaging that is occurring in our relationship with our principal ally, the US.
To get back to that Richo quote, Australians are seeing the decisions of the Foreign Minister up close and they don’t like what they see. The Foreign Minister’s blind spots are impeding our national interest. Frankly, on this, as on so many other fronts, Australia needs change.
Julian Leeser is a Jewish Liberal MP
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