Sydney can shake off its summer of bad news. Albanese may not be so lucky

In sleepy Dural, in the city’s north-west, the sophisticated methods being devised to strike terror in Sydney’s Jewish community were stunningly revealed on Wednesday. NSW Police and their federal counterparts confirmed that an abandoned caravan laden with explosives from a mine site had been discovered some 10 days earlier. As well as enough ammunition to cause a 40-metre blast wave, there was a note with the address of a synagogue in the caravan.

It was a dramatic escalation in the wave of antisemitism that is sweeping Sydney.

Earlier in the day, NSW Transport Minister Jo Haylen’s electorate office was in targeted in broad daylight on a busy road in Marrickville. Her office has been graffitied or vandalised five times since the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel. Most, although not all, of the incidents have been antisemitic.

Why Haylen? Her office is in a prominent location in Sydney’s inner west, it’s unmistakably Labor, and she is from the party’s Left. It may simply be coincidence, but it cannot be ignored that Haylen’s electorate office is also directly opposite that of her federal Labor counterpart, Anthony Albanese, the federal MP for Grayndler and prime minister. (Security is significantly tighter around his office).

The Sydney electorate office of Transport Minister Jo Haylen has been graffitied multiple times in recent months. Credit: Facebook

The targeting of Haylen’s office is just one of many antisemitic attacks across Sydney, which have been becoming disturbingly common and increasingly dangerous over the summer months. MPs in other states have also been targeted (Victorian Labor MP Josh Burns, who is Jewish, last year had his office splashed in red paint with the words “Zionism is fascism”). But in Sydney, even a childcare centre, located just near the Maroubra Synagogue and Mount Sinai College – an Orthodox Jewish school and preschool – was not spared.

On January 21, the Only About Children centre was set alight and graffitied in the dead of night. The words “f--- the Jews” were sprayed in black paint on a wall. Only days earlier, a fire was started outside the former Dover Heights home of prominent Jewish leader Alex Ryvchin. He had moved out a year before.

NSW is not immune to bad news summers. From the devastating Black Summer fires that raged over the final days of 2019 and into 2020, followed by COVID outbreaks, premiers have spent successive new years delivering and responding to bad news. This summer is no different. Grim news has again been a defining characteristic of January.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Premier Chris Minns and acting NSW Police Commissioner Peter Thurtell at a press conference on January 21.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

For Premier Chris Minns, the first month of 2025 has been spent confronting a law and order crisis as antisemitic violence shatters what should be Sydney’s sleepy season. Add an attack on the NSW Police Wall of Remembrance in the Domain and there is a dark cloud of disharmony hanging over the city. A bitter and drawn-out industrial rail dispute has done nothing to help the mood, which was already bleak enough as living costs continue to soar.

Neither Minns nor Albanese can be held responsible for much of the malaise, but that matters little to voters. NSW is two years away from an election so, politically, Minns has time to ride out these bad times, but an angry, scared Sydney is a big risk for Albanese. Sydney and key parts of regional NSW are critical to the re-election of an Albanese government.

At the moment, the electorates that Albanese needs to hold on to power are the very ones looking for someone to blame. Many of these are on the city’s fringes in western Sydney, the Central Coast or in the Hunter, where crime and safety are often front of mind. Couple this with a deep distrust from members of the Jewish community who believe Albanese has turned his back on them, and Labor’s path back to Canberra is rocky.

Law and order is standard fodder for state election campaigns, but usually less so for a federal poll. This year’s federal election, due before May 17, is shaping up to be different, not least because Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, a former police officer, is perfectly placed to make law and order his strong suit. He has not wasted any opportunity, including audacious claims that “every incident of antisemitism” in Australia since late 2023 could be traced to Albanese’s weak leadership.

Albanese was too slow and insipid in his early responses to the rise of antisemitism. His ill-thought-out game of tennis in Perth after the firebombing of a Melbourne synagogue only served to highlight this. He has been late to catch up, but Albanese was straight to the Maroubra childcare centre, before later standing with NSW Police and Minns for a media conference condemning the latest round of violence. It was a marked change from the prime minister’s earlier positioning.

A law and order auction will not be enough to win Dutton government in a cost-of-living crisis. But it will help him cement his leadership as a hard head in exactly the geographic areas of NSW he needs to win. Albanese still has time to turn his fortunes around, but only if he truly understands the risk of looking impotent when voters are scared.

Alexandra Smith is the state political editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.

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