PM’s lack of moral fibre is now beyond dispute

‘Photo opportunity’: Anthony Albanese meets Jewish leaders early this month. Picture: PMO

It’s no longer premature to say it: Anthony Albanese is simply out of his depth as our Prime Minister.

In terms of judgment, character, leadership and the intellectual heft required to grapple with the complex challenges of these times, Australians are waking up to the sad reality that this emperor has no clothes.

At one time his support for the voice might have been put down to an excess of goodwill; his support for re-regulating the workplace the result of union paymasters calling in their debts; his energy follies, in part, the result of his faction’s long war with the Greens; his inertia on national security exposed by his own admission as opposition leader that he would never have the fortitude to turn back boats, hence his preference for open borders and Big Australia.

But taken cumulatively with his refusal this week to state a position on the International Criminal Court’s moral equivalence between the actions of liberal democratic Israel in self-defence and the atrocities of the designated terrorist group Hamas, it shows a damning deficiency of judgment and character. I might have disagreed with his predecessors from time to time, but this is the first time I’ve genuinely become embarrassed that our national leader is just not up to the job.

When the ICC’s chief prosecutor recommended issuing war crimes arrest warrants against Israel’s Prime Minister and Defence Minister, even Joe Biden was quick off the mark, saying this was “outrageous” and there could never, ever be any even-handedness between a country responding to a great atrocity and the terror group pledged to repeating it.

The best our Prime Minister could offer was the lame justification that he never commented on cases before courts, even though he did just that shortly afterwards with a view on the ongoing legal woes of Julian Assange. It’s a telling commentary on our Prime Minister’s fitness for office that he felt more solidarity with a low-life who’s largely the author of his own misfortune than leaders of a fellow democracy unfairly arraigned.

Israel's Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Our Prime Minister must really think that Israel and Hamas are as bad as each other, or he’s too worried about the Muslim vote in key Labor seats to express a view. But regardless of his underlying motivation, it shows a lack of moral judgment that ultimately goes to character. How could the leader of a democracy not appreciate the moral difference between a polity such as his own and a terrorist group; or, if he did appreciate it, subordinate it to crass electoral calculation? Especially a Prime Minister who claims to model himself on Labor’s greatest leader, Bob Hawke, who famously declared “if the bell tolls for Israel … it will toll for all mankind”.

For Hawke, unlike the current generation of Labor leaders, the mistakes liberal democratic govern­ments sometimes make never obscured the fundamental distinction between democracies and dictatorships.

The Prime Minister and his colleagues have basically been sitting on the fence ever since Hamas broke the ceasefire on October 7 last year by butchering 1200 innocent Israelis and seizing more than 200 hostages. Notwithstanding the disgrace that echoed around the world, of protesters before the Sydney Opera House bellowing “F..k the Jews”, government ministers have not once condemned the now rampant anti-Semitism without bracketing it with an all-but-non-existent Islamophobia.

They’ve never clearly condemned the now routine protests disrupting our big cities or the intimidatory encampments disfiguring our universities. Led by Foreign Minister Penny Wong, the government has broken almost eight decades of bipartisanship by voting in favour of Palestinian UN membership in what looks like reward for terrorism. And to show just how weak and perfidious Albanese is, just days before Australia voted to walk away from supporting Israel he fronted the Central Synagogue in Sydney in a staged photo opportunity with a community desperately wanting a show of support from their leader. Instead of being upfront with them about what his officials were negotiating in New York, the Prime Minister used these Jewish leaders for propaganda purposes; a media stunt intended to portray solidarity and counterbalance what he knew was to come out of the UN.

The contrast between Biden’s moral clarity and Albanese’s “no comment” is stark. Labor spinners have put this down to the fact the US does not recognise the ICC’s jurisdiction while we do. But this actually gives us a responsibility that the US doesn’t have, to arrest Bibi Netanyahu if he were to come here. This makes the Prime Minister’s handwashing of the issue even more of a cop-out; or perhaps another case where he just doesn’t do detail.

On top of everything else, this latest piece of moral myopia suggests that our 31st Prime Minister has hardly grown out of the Trotskyism he espoused as an undergraduate. He’s got older and luckier but hardly more mature or wiser. And this latest and most egregious dereliction of leadership crystallises every one of his previous failures into the damning judgment that he’s just not up to it.

Eventually, almost every prime minister loses the benefit of the doubt and is judged no longer worthy of office. The time comes when an incumbent, however worthy, can do almost no right and a challenger, however flawed, almost no wrong. For an illustration, look at John Howard and Kevin Rudd in 2007. That this is coming so early in Albanese’s term, and with almost no fanning from internal rivals, reveals the paltriness of his credentials for office.

True, post budget, his net approval rating has limped out of negative territory and he’s still Newspoll’s preferred prime minister. But no budget in a quarter century has rated as badly for the economy or has left voters as underwhelmed.

Even comparatively small things now seem to confirm the larger inadequacy. Like his decision to evict his tenant from his Sydney investment property in the middle of housing crisis that he has directly fuelled with record high migration. Or the big things, like his repeated failures to man up to Beijing over dangerous conduct by Chinese military towards our own. Like his inability to act against ministers who manifestly are also out of their depth or mismanaging their responsibilities.

Albanese only scraped into office in the first place, almost without declared policies and with a record low Labor primary vote, on the back of the electorate’s disdain for Scott Morrison. The record number of independents now in the parliament testifies to voters’ disenchantment with politics as usual from both sides. Still, the tendency to give first-term incumbents the benefit of the doubt makes a teal-Greens-backed minority government the most likely option from an election that could well happen this year. Almost certainly that would only reinforce the tribal leftism of this beyond mediocre Prime Minister.

This is where there is a real opportunity for Peter Dutton. Forget the commentators who think slick delivery and clever lines are what will win over voters. Right now, given the worries people face and their fears about the future, an opponent with moral clarity and trustworthiness is the biggest contrast with Albanese, and the greatest risk to Labor. Howard was mocked for being dependable; Dutton wants to wear that as a badge of honour.