Anthony Albanese’s refusal to take a position on the International Criminal Court’s pursuit of Israel is as absurd as it has become untenable.
If the Prime Minister maintains his view there is no moral equivalence between Israel’s actions and the terrorism of Hamas, then by definition he must disagree with the ICC’s pursuit of the Israeli leadership.
There is no other way to see it.
And Albanese appears to now realise he is on shaky ground.
US President Joe Biden is in a worse political position than Albanese, yet he stared down the left and called out a decision he described as outrageous.
Even British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak criticised the ICC.
Albanese has responded by burying his head in the sand and refusing to declare even a personal view. Is he suggesting Australia’s closest allies are wrong?
The Prime Minister’s answers to further questions on this issue have now shifted from evasive to incomprehensible.
He has had two days to make a clear statement one way or the other. Instead, at a press conference on Thursday and faced with the inevitable question, he descended further into obscurity.
The ICC has now posed a diabolic question for Albanese, which may well end up being more than just a hypothetical dilemma.
Asked whether he would seek the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu – if warrants were issued, and in the unlikely event that he should he ever visit Australia again – Albanese said Australia would make its own decisions.
Yet as a signatory to the Rome Statute that established the ICC, Australia would be obliged to arrest the Israeli Prime Minister.
Does Albanese seriously believe this is a defensible position to hold?
As Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong issued declarations of support for the independence of the ICC, Albanese appeared to raise questions about the Howard government’s decision to sign up to it when Alexander Downer was foreign affairs minister.
“It’s up them to explain those decisions at that time,” he said.
Had anyone envisaged its evolution from 1998 to this point, it is unlikely that the Coalition would have signed Australia up to the ICC. Downer has made that point pretty clear.
It’s not clear what Albanese was trying to imply.
The contrast between the Prime Minister and Peter Dutton is becoming starker by the day.
There is no equivocation from the Liberal leader, who has threatened to tear up Australia’s membership to the ICC. He has accused Albanese of a “shameful act” and leaving the Jewish community in a state of bewilderment.
Dutton raises the question of whether it was a conscious decision made by Albanese and/or Wong – or the National Security Committee – not to intervene and to remain silent during the ICC consultation phase.
The motivation of the ICC also needs to be examined. As Dutton points out, this is germane to Australia’s own vulnerability should Australian troops ever be subject to investigation or prosecution by the same prosecutors who have made this decision on Israel.
Dutton’s instinctive pursuit of this serves a dual purpose. He has sided with the US and UK in raising legitimate question about the integrity of the court itself.
This is isolating Albanese further on the government’s perceived failure to address anti-Semitism more broadly.
Aside from the perverse irony that the ICC was established upon the precedent of the Nuremberg trials and the prosecution of Nazis, this latest decision is symbolic of a more fundamental problem for the West.
Albanese is trapped between Labor’s zealous commitment to multi-nationalist institutions and the alleged failure of these very bodies to uphold the liberal democratic values upon which they were founded.
Scott Morrison was ridiculed by Labor for his warning of “negative globalism”. The ICC wasn’t in his sights, largely because of its ineffectiveness.
Morrison’s warning about supra-nationalist institutions was provoked by the gradual erosion of the UN and fears that it would eventually work against the interests of the West, as China and Russia sought to subvert its foundations and its structures.
He was partly vindicated by the failure of the World Health Organisation to pursue China over the origins of Covid-19.
All of this was completely foreseeable, but for reasons of complacency, or romanticism, the West is now paying the price.
The ICC decision only further illuminates the moral and strategic crisis for the West and amplifies the contortions within the Labor Party, while dangerously exposing the Prime Minister to opposition claims that he lacks moral courage and leadership.
On the latter, this is of Albanese’s own making.
ICC controversy: Albanese’s position in his own words
On the ICC
‘We make our own decisions. We make our own decisions and we will continue to do that. I got asked a question yesterday … I got asked an obtuse question yesterday or the day before and today I’ll make this point. That there is no … because I assume you’re referring to the ICC, which actually was signed up to, of course, not by my government, but by the Howard government when Alexander Downer was the foreign minister. So, it’s up to them, I think, to explain those decisions at that time.
“What we’ve been very clear about, and I was clear about two days ago, didn’t get a run in any of the quotes that were used, but I made it clear a couple of days ago, our opposition to what happened on October 7, once again, to the terrorist actions of Hamas.
“There is no equivalence between a terrorist organisation like Hamas, that we support that ongoing classification of Hamas as a terrorist organisation. They confirmed on October 7 with the violent murders and the capturing of hostages that occurred on October 7, that that was the right designation for them to have and that compares and should not be compared with any nation state.
‘We carried a resolution in the parliament with the support of the government that I moved and the support of the opposition that made it clear our opposition to October 7, our call unequivocally for the release of hostages, and our call for an end to the attacks on Israel that were occurring.
“We also called for, then, for international humanitarian law to be applied as is appropriate. And we also call for since then a humanitarian ceasefire. We call for humanitarian aid and we call for the political advance for a two state solution where both Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace and security as we go forward …
On the warrants
“Well, I’m not about to go into hypotheticals about things that have not happened. There hasn’t actually been, there’s been an application. Be very clear about what’s happened here. There’s been an application. There’s been no determination by the ICC against any individual or anybody at this point in time …
On his stance
Look Peter Dutton will use his own words. And what I do is take a principled position, which is what we have … We have said that Israel has a right to defend itself. How it defends itself matters. We have said that very, very clearly. What I don’t do as Prime Minister is to respond to every incoming quote. I mean, you have in the parliament, you have had the Greens move suspension motions every week in order to then mischaracterise what that means when those suspension motions haven’t come up. What we actually need going forward is a coherent position, which is what we have taken. We’ll continue to do that, take a principal position going forward.”
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