‘Social cohesion’ is just the latest cover for PM’s moral torpor

Anthony Albanese speaks to the media after he visited the damaged Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne. Picture: Getty Images

There are shades of Kristallnacht in Melbourne. Across the country a pogrom of sorts has been underway in this country for more than a year, left to fester and ultimately rupture multiculturalism in the absence of political leadership.

Pogroms, for those who need a reminder, were organised massacres of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and Russia. Governments manipulated the citizenry and then stood back while citizens did their dirty work.

The arson attack at the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne’s inner east was a terrorist event confirmed by the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police, Shane Patten, four days after the attack.

Patten said that an earlier call could not have been made because police had only a “crime scene to work with”.

We all knew what had happened was a terrorist attack, an anti-Semitic outrage designed to instil more fear in the hearts of Jewish Australians. Just hours after the reports of the attack emerged, the PM said it was a terrorist attack “in his opinion” and by Monday, the AFP agreed.

Albanese’s failure to visit the Adass Israel Synagogue for five days cannot simply be added to a list of political stumbles or faux pas. This is not Albanese’s Hawaiian moment – a reference to Scott Morrison’s political blindness during the bushfires in eastern Australia in 2019. This is not just a failure of political judgment but a deficit of national leadership.

The basic requirements of any political leader dictate Albanese should’ve been consoling Jewish Australians, worshippers standing before the wreck of the synagogue and offering comfort at the earliest opportunity. One of his many talented speechwriters could’ve concocted heartfelt messages, not just of sympathy but of a renewed strength of purpose to rid this country of anti-Semitism once and for all. Instead, Albanese waited so that by the time he walked through the ashes of the synagogue five days later he had little consolation to offer and was rightly pilloried by the crowd. One woman at the scene described Albanese’s visit as “just a photo op”, and it is hard to disagree.

Rather than cancel his appointments for the weekend, the PM spent it in Perth, attending fundraisers, meetings and playing a spot of tennis in the afternoon. The failure of leadership was so immense that all Albanese could do was nitpick on the timing of his hit and giggle at Cottesloe Tennis Club on Saturday.

“I wasn’t playing tennis on Saturday morning,” the PM said.

“That’s wrong?” a reporter replied.

“That’s wrong,” Albanese said. “I had six appointments on Saturday.

“After they had concluded late in the afternoon, I did some exercise,” Albanese said, confirming he had played tennis in the Western Australian afternoon.

“That’s what people do. On Saturday morning, I was in a synagogue. I’ve seen some comments in the media about why there wasn’t media coverage there. That was because it was Shabbat and, as people can confirm, photos and electronic information wasn’t available then. Indeed, I attended the bar mitzvah of a young boy there and I was very much welcomed there.”

Scott Morrison

One well-worn phrase used by the PM is social cohesion. It is a largely meaningless term, a feel-good, hollow expression that for the most part Australia is a successful immigrant nation. This is no accident. Our success as a nation of immigrants is driven by political leadership from Menzies on, which embraces multiculturalism through the prism of assimilation. We are all different but what we have in common unites us.

The success story is falling apart before our eyes while Albanese and Labor play wretched politics, sniffing out votes in western Sydney. Absent strong political leadership, almost any appalling act can be rationalised in the community now. In the vacuum, reflexive rhetoric is created where shameful parallels are drawn between a terror attack and the fear it instils in segments of our community, and acts of distorted activism including vandalism become one in a melting pot of dismal equi­vocations from this government.

Senator Fatima Payman pointed to an arson attack on an Islamic School bus in Adelaide in a feat of po-faced whataboutery. The bus was parked outside the front of the Adelaide home of the bus driver who was roused from his sleep and extinguished the flames.

“There’s no outrage, there’s no pledges (sic) of support … why the double standard?” Payman said.

“Not all hate is treated equally.”

Payman’s remarks ignore the substantial distinction between an act of terrorism – arson of a place of worship where people were inside the building at the time of the attack – and a fire in an empty school bus that police are currently investigating and where a motive, political or otherwise, is yet to emerge.

Fatima Payman.

In the wake of the attack at the Adass Israel Synagogue, social media featured a shower of anti-Semitism, false equivalencies and miserable justifications.

There are people on the left in this country who have made names for themselves fighting right-wing extremism where anti-Semitism lies never far from the surface who fell silent as the synagogue smouldered. It is a form of intellectual myopia, driven by ideology and given momentum amid the shipment of ancient hatreds from faraway places into this country. Similarly, people of a certain view might oppose Benjamin Netanyahu and his government and its military forays into Gaza, Lebanon and Syria on humanitarian grounds. Although I don’t agree with it, it is a perfectly legitimate opinion to hold.

Indeed, many Jews in Australia may argue the same thing. It is only in the ­vacuum of political leadership where that view extends to the rationalisation of ethnic persecution, where it is morally justifiable for an ethnic and religious minority to be the subject of terrorism and political violence.