Labor now desperately reactive, unable to hold a position from one day to the next
In the Israel-Hamas conflict, the Albanese government has been out of its depth. On China it has been outplayed by Beijing. The fiasco in defence is unbelievable.
The Albanese government is coming apart in foreign policy, national security and defence.
It has become incoherent and indecipherable. It consistently tries to hide basic information, can’t maintain cabinet unity or policy consistency, its ministers frequently contradict each other and often seem to have no idea what they’re talking about.
The government is now desperately reactive, unable to hold a position from one day to the next.
The wheels are coming off in what had once seemed potentially a strong suit. In the Israel-Hamas conflict, the Albanese government has been completely out of its depth. On China it has become self-contradictory, weak, and has been outplayed by Beijing. And the fiasco in defence goes from bad to unbelievable, almost beyond parody.
The government’s biggest moral failing has been its response to the Israel-Hamas war. Labor is much less a friend of Israel than the Liberal and National parties. Even before the atrocities of October 7 – when Hamas engaged in a savage burst of terrorist torture, murder and kidnap at a level of barbarity as grotesque as anything in modern history – Labor had moved decisively against Israel.
It reversed a series of key votes in the UN, dropped diplomatic recognition of West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and abandoned the previous government’s correct designation of Gaza and the West Bank as disputed territories, labelling them “occupied Palestinian territories”. It also doubled aid for a virulently anti-Israel UN agency.
Yet when asked the obvious question, does “occupation” mean Israel should immediately withdraw from these territories, Foreign Minister Penny Wong could only equivocate, as withdrawal is obviously untenable.
Since October 7, Labor has been a picture of moral and political confusion. As soon as the atrocities occurred, Wong condemned them, then immediately urged restraint on Israel. There’s nothing wrong with restraint, but this was morally tin-eared. It’s like telling a rape victim not to be too hostile to her rapist.
The government has no historical sense or moral imagination. There is a global crisis of anti-Semitism, which a civilised social democratic government should resist root and branch. All the different strands of anti-Semitism are coming together. The distinct Arab anti-Semitism has joined with the anti-Semitism of the far left, which wrongly sees the whole of the Israeli state as an exercise in Western colonial repression. The savage nihilism of this thinking is represented by the Australian Greens.
Anthony Albanese, Wong and other Labor ministers seem incapable of saying the word anti-Semitism without adding a condemnation of Islamophobia, as though these are equal, somehow intrinsically linked, threats.
Centre-left politicians scared to alienate left activists or Muslims by saying something that could be construed as pro-Israel typically deal with anti-Semitism in one of two ways. They either talk entirely about the Holocaust – because who can fail to oppose the Nazis? – or they bracket every mention of anti-Semitism with Islamophobia.
Wong has been particularly guilty of this. In many ways the most formidable member of the government, Wong has nonetheless put in a very poor performance on this issue.
As have her colleagues. Ed Husic immediately accused Israel of collective punishment of Palestinians and called for the Palestinian flag to be flown. This contradicted his own government’s policy. Albanese couldn’t maintain cabinet discipline for even a couple of days. His government was weaker, less disciplined, than British Labour under Opposition Leader Keir Starmer.
The Australian Jewish community has been terrified by the surge of hate-filled anti-Semitism coming from Islamist and far-left supporters of the Palestinian cause. There have been unbelievable scenes in Australia, scenes that resemble the first stages of traditional 19th-century anti-Jewish pogroms in eastern Europe. Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters chanting “F--k the Jews”, “Gas the Jews”, “Kill the Jews” on the foreshore of the Sydney Opera House while police advised Jews to stay home for their own protection. Hate-filled slogans screamed outside a synagogue on a Friday night in Melbourne’s Caulfield, leading police to advise worshippers that they were not safe in the synagogue and should go home. Not safe in the synagogue, in Australia, in 2023!
Pro-Palestinian motorcades drove through areas in Sydney’s eastern suburbs with strong Jewish populations in a naked bid to intimidate local Jewish people. Two Jewish young men in Bondi were told they’d be killed if they didn’t put an Israeli flag away.
Yet when condemning such unspeakable actions, ministers have had to give themselves an anti-Islamophobia alibi. No one has been worse than Tony Burke. He initially declined to condemn remarks by a Muslim religious leader in his electorate welcoming the Hamas atrocities. And when asked on Radio National whether Israel was guilty of genocide in Gaza he could only say he didn’t want to get hung up on words.
This is one of the most morally bankrupt and ethically disgraceful comments ever made in Australian politics. Israel certainly has never been guilty of anything that could ever be described as genocide. That Burke could not even bring himself to say this demonstrates he is a senior figure in a political movement completely bereft of any principle. At best, it’s rank moral cowardice.
The government has been horribly tricky about information. Only because the ABC broke the story did we find out that the government had issued 860 visas to Palestinians in Gaza to come to Australia. When challenged on this, Wong’s defence was that all the security clearances had been done and, wait for it, the bizarre statement that 1700 visas had been issued to Israelis.
Say what? Israel is a liberal democracy with the rule of law and a diverse political culture. On occasions, Canberra describes it as an ally. As far as I know, no Israeli citizen who has come to Australia has ever engaged in violent extremism, terrorism or ethnic hatred. Gaza, on the other hand, is one of the most ubiquitously anti-Semitic territories in the world. From earliest school education children are taught to hate Jews. The last time Gaza had a democratic election, it elected Hamas as its government. And Hamas is proscribed under Australian law as a terrorist organisation. What polling evidence there is shows majority support in Gaza for the terrorist atrocities of October 7.
The idea that any meaningful Australian security checks could be carried out for residents of Gaza, where there is not a single Australian official present, is ridiculous. Government bureaucracies can’t manage Robodebt, you think they can penetrate the inner secrets of Gaza?
Not only that, Gaza is surrounded by Arab Muslim nations with hundreds of millions of people. Those wishing to leave could surely be accommodated in regional countries. Most of the surrounding Arab countries are extremely reluctant to take any additional Palestinians from Gaza. Albanese’s claim that these visas are temporary is just the latest in a series of comments that defy common sense and have lost connection with reality.
All of the terrible suffering of innocent people in Gaza is the moral responsibility of Hamas. If the Albanese government had a moral compass it would demand not only that Hamas immediately release all hostages but that it surrender control in Gaza and give itself up for prosecution for the crimes of October 7. Instead, at every point, its rhetorical inclination is to make some kind of political or moral equivalence between Gaza and Israel.
The Albanese government now seems beset by syndromes of weakness and reaction that normally come to a government in its decrepitude after a long time in office. Most governments get better at foreign policy over time, especially during their first term, then eventually lose energy and conviction. But whether it has simply lost all self-confidence because of the huge defeat in the voice referendum, or whether it just lacks strategic grasp and animating principles, the government now seems to be totally reactive, political and transactional. You can almost see it calculating: what’s the minimum we can say that will get us past criticism by the Jewish community, what is taboo to say if we want to keep Muslim votes in southwest Sydney, how much are we under threat from Green anti-Israel extremism in the inner cities?
Being in government means making hard choices. Labor, as much as the Coalition in its last term, seems incapable of deciding what it thinks is right and then persuading the electorate through patient advocacy. Instead, it seeks magically to arrive at positions that don’t offend the jostling, contradictory interest groups it’s trying to appease. The result is complete incoherence.
We see this on China policy. As Michael Shoebridge from Strategic Analysis Australia observed, Albanese went to Washington, stood beside Joe Biden and pledged to de-risk supply chains overly dependent on China. He then went to Beijing, lavishly praised China and beatifically promised Australia would do every bit of trade with China it could. Then he went to the South Pacific where his government has been warning regional governments not to get too close to China.
The problem with speaking out of different sides of your mouth to different audiences is that sometimes people can see how contradictory, and therefore ultimately how worthless, your remarks are.
The Chinese naval incident was shocking and a clear failure by the Albanese government. After Albanese had his Beijing love-in with Chinese President Xi Jinping, a Chinese navy ship intentionally used its sonar to injure Australian divers working beneath one of our frigates to disentangle a fishing net from the ship’s propellers.
It was an outrageous, aggressive action. After this incident, Albanese then had two conversations with Xi at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in San Francisco. They were not formal bilateral meetings but one, according to Albanese, was an extended conversation and he described some of the things the two discussed. Defence Minister Richard Marles did not disclose the naval incident until after Albanese’s plane had taken off from the US, so the Prime Minister didn’t have to answer questions on it. This is frankly pathetic.
Albanese still won’t say whether he raised the issue with Xi but has taken refuge behind a newly minted protocol, which he has just invented, that you never disclose even the broad subjects of an informal conversation with another leader, even though he himself did disclose several of the things he and Xi discussed. Albanese will have to tell us eventually whether he raised the naval incident with Xi. If he didn’t, it’s unforgivable and a betrayal of our service personnel. If he did but is too scared to say so, that’s almost as bad.
The government started off well on China, security issues generally and defence. Albanese made strong, substantial speeches in opposition.
But now it looks as though those were purely designed to neutralise national security as an election issue. The government has now made stabilising the relationship with China a primary policy objective and decided to market this as its main foreign policy achievement. This weakens Australia and gives enormous leverage to Beijing.
To get stabilisation, the Albanese government has basically stopped criticising any aspect of Beijing’s behaviour. The public reaction to the naval incident was so great that Albanese was more or less forced to come out and make some critical remarks after he got home. But he didn’t subject himself to a press conference.
At the same time, having in opposition criticised the Port of Darwin being controlled by a Chinese-owned company, Albanese then decided, effectively as an offering to Xi before his visit, to leave the port in Chinese corporate control.
Beijing has got everything it wanted from the stabilisation of relations that it decided to do for its own reasons, including an improved public profile in Australia.
The very slow unwinding of a few trade restrictions is small beer for Beijing. Nor is there any evidence that Beijing has any respect for the Albanese government. Chinese Premier Li Qiang notably described Albanese as a “handsome boy”.
The international evidence is that servility to Beijing produces at best very short-term gains but normally earns long-term contempt from the Chinese. The “Australianologists” in the Chinese foreign ministry and intelligence services are extremely sophisticated and understand our idiom, our humour and everything else. “Handsome boy” is not a sign of affection but of contempt. It’s patronising in the extreme and a term that diminishes its subject, which places Australia as the very junior partner, the child.
Imagine the Chinese reaction if Marles referred to Xi as a “cuddly, reassuring Winnie-the-Pooh figure”. Bilateral relations would never recover.
The government’s growing incoherence on China is sometimes embarrassing. In India, Marles described China as Australia’s chief security anxiety. Next day Wong said she wouldn’t use the word anxiety. Foreign and defence ministers can’t co-ordinate and even anxiety is apparently too hawkish a term.
Finally, the defence fiasco just goes from disaster to sick joke. The government recently drew attention to the fact the navy’s surface fleet is now the oldest it has ever been. My colleague Ben Packham revealed that one of our elderly, semi-invalid Anzac-class frigates, the HMAS Anzac, is now indefinitely beached. The government can’t even crew the Anzacs.
We have a pitiful surface fleet of eight aged Anzacs and three air warfare destroyers. The government has frequently told us these are the most difficult strategic circumstances we’ve faced in 80 years. At first it said we had to respond urgently. So it had what it said would be a short, fast Defence Strategic Review. The DSR was censored and all it could say about the surface fleet was there should be another review.
The government says it will respond to that review some time next year. That could be March or April. But when that review comes down, two years into a three-year term, it will at best recommend the beginning of new, multi-year tender processes for various surface combatants.
The only new surface combatant under way are the disastrous Hunter-class frigates, whose cost has already blown out from $30bn to $45bn. We don’t even get the first Hunter until 2032 or 2033 if we’re lucky. There will be federal elections in 2025, 2028 and 2031. We could buy surface combatants made overseas more quickly. But the government continues with the fiction of a continuous shipbuilding industry, even though we have no actual shipbuilding to speak of. And there’s no new defence money. So this government would notionally be in its fourth term before we get a single new surface combatant, while the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines are a distant fantasy.
The conclusion is inescapable. The government doesn’t believe its own words about strategic urgency. It’s all press releases and photo ops, happy international trips and so-called defence diplomacy, symbols and bullshit. In private Marles talks like Dick Cheney but in terms of defence capability delivers absolutely nothing.
This government is a mess.
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