Israel has spent the past two years on a relentless, extremely violent, calculated rampage of slaughter and destruction throughout the Middle East. And yet, we are still told, it is the real victim. 
The supposedly ever-present existential threat faced by Israel has been a core part of the ideological justification for every Israeli atrocity since the creation of the state in 1948. Supporters of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/27/israel-gaza-propaganda">from President Isaac Herzog down</a>, claim that every Palestinian, including children, is a legitimate target to be expelled or killed, because every Gazan is either a current or future “terrorist”. 
Recently, Israeli Prime Minister and wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Iran was imminently going to acquire nuclear weapons and use them on Israel in a “nuclear holocaust”—the same claim he has been making for more than 30 years. Of course, the only nuclear-armed states that actually bombed anyone were Israel and the US, which killed nearly 1,000 Iranians in 12 days of strikes.
The mainstream media and politicians’ constant attempts to spin the story that Israel is the victim, the underdog, the state “defending itself”, are so out of touch with reality that they are becoming increasingly desperate and farcical. The UK Labour government is perhaps leading the Western world into this Orwellian abyss by its charging of the band Kneecap with terrorism offences due to their support for the Palestinian people, its attempts to censor artists at the Glastonbury music festival and now its proscription of non-violent protest group Palestine Action as a “terrorist” organisation, all while the UK continues to arm and support Israel’s genocidal terror in Gaza. But if you were to listen to the UK political establishment, you’d think it was the IDF that was the victim.
Welcome to the upside-down world of 2025, where the daily mass murder and starvation of children is fine and normal, but speaking against that is extremism, violence and hate speech.
Israel is the dominant military power in the Middle East, a position considerably strengthened in recent years. It is the only nuclear-armed power in the region, and is thought to have as many as 400 nuclear warheads. It is backed to the hilt, armed and given favourable intelligence-sharing and economic deals by all the Western imperialist powers, while also enjoying friendly relations and trade deals with other major powers like China, Russia and India. The US State Department boasts: “Since its founding in 1948, the United States has provided Israel with over $130 billion in bilateral assistance ...This assistance has helped transform the Israel Defense Forces into one of the world’s most capable, effective militaries and turned the Israeli military industry and technology sector into one of the largest exporters of military capabilities worldwide”.
Israel has, since October 2023, laid waste to Gaza, dropping the equivalent of six nuclear weapons’ worth of explosives on the tiny enclave, while also bombing Yemen, Iran, Syria and Lebanon, the latter two which it also invaded and continues to occupy. Much of this carnage has been bankrolled by the US, with more than US$30 billion delivered in aid and other financial and military assistance packages in the past two years. Since its creation, Israel has begun wars with every one of its neighbours, some on multiple occasions.
Israel has turned Gaza into a killing field, where soldiers are <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-27/ty-article-magazine/.premium/idf-soldiers-ordered-to-shoot-deliberately-at-unarmed-gazans-waiting-for-humanitarian-aid/00000197-ad8e-de01-a39f-ffbe33780000">ordered to shoot</a> starving civilians seeking aid. Many Israeli soldiers don’t need orders; they understand their mission is genocide, and they <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-12-23/ty-article-opinion/.premium/when-you-enter-gaza-you-are-god-inside-the-minds-of-idf-soldiers-who-commit-war-crimes/00000193-f2a4-dc18-a3db-fee62b540000">shoot and torture</a> Palestinians for fun, while taking selfies, singing and dancing, in line with their extreme ethno-nationalist ideology, in which they are god’s chosen people and the Palestinians are not even human beings. 
Within the rest of the historic land of Palestine, Israel has constructed a suffocating apparatus of military occupation and control, built on the principles of apartheid, exclusion, constant surveillance, checkpoints, mass incarceration, torture, terror, impoverishment and humiliation of the Palestinian population. All this is conducted with cutting-edge technology and in conjunction with the collaborationist Palestinian Authority. Israel’s ambition for the millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank, or within what is now called Israel, is ultimately similar to Gaza: expulsion, death and the complete destruction of any Palestinian identity.
The state of Israel is manifestly not under any current existential threat. It is Israel that is the existential threat: to Palestinians and millions of others in the region. Despite the absurdity of the claim, it persists because the powerful repeat it over and over again, without regard for evidence. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently explained why: “Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us”. He doesn’t mean the billions of people, including the majority of Germans, who oppose Israel’s rampage, but the billionaires, bureaucrats and military chiefs who run the system. For them, seeing their Middle East proxy wage death and destruction is satisfying proof of a good investment.

Josh Lees

Won’t somebody think of poor Israel?

Let’s take a moment to celebrate the downfall of the election’s biggest loser, Peter Dutton. Scott Morrison’s electoral loss in 2022 was the worst Liberal-National Party result for at least 70 years. Dutton has topped that, with a further swing away from the Coalition and the loss of at least a dozen more seats. The Liberal Party’s lower house representatives have been wiped out of many major Australian cities, and the entirety of Tasmania, the ACT and the NT.
Dutton says his hero and mentor is the conservative former PM John Howard. Dutton has managed to emulate none of Howard’s successes, only his final act of humiliation by losing his seat of Dickson, just as Howard lost Bennelong in 2007. In fact, Dutton has made history by becoming the first opposition leader to lose his own seat, suffering an 8 percent negative primary vote swing, more than twice as bad as his party’s terrible national average, and falling a whopping 12 percent short of Labor’s Ali France in two-party preferred terms.
Dutton praised his other hero, Donald Trump, as a “big thinker” after the US president announced his plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza. He suggested that he would be best-placed to have a cosy relationship with the far-right billionaire. But Dutton is such a loser that, after the election, Trump said he had “no idea” who Dutton even was. Sad.
On election night, Labor Treasurer Jim Chalmers said he did not “intend to dance on Peter Dutton’s grave”. That’s fine, because we don’t want to share the dance floor with Labor politicians who spent far too much of their last term dancing to Dutton’s tune. For everyone else, join us as Red Flag, Australia’s leading “hate media” outlet, leads us on this merry jig atop the corpse of the despicable career of Peter Dutton.
Dutton grew up in Brisbane and joined the Young Liberals at age 18. By 19, he was already running (and losing) as a Liberal candidate. He failed out of his business degree at Queensland University of Technology and, in a logical move for a human failure, joined the police force. He remained a cop for a decade, until he <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-11/federal-election-peter-dutton-ali-france-united-by-trauma/11057856">crashed</a> and rolled his unmarked Mazda 626 while on a stakeout outside a fast food restaurant. He then joined his father’s property development business, reportedly making more than $30 million in property transactions over the subsequent 35 years, making him one of Australia’s richest politicians. Dutton became a member of parliament in 2001.
His <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=375542584398963">maiden speech</a> in 2002 railed against our “over tolerant society” and the “politically correct”, singling out “the Civil Liberties Council, the Refugee Action Collective, and certainly the dictatorship of the trade union movement”. Under the Howard government, he championed attacks on civil liberties, welfare recipients and workers’ rights and justified the “war on terror”.
In 2015, after the Tony Abbott government tried (and failed) to dismantle the public health system and introduce compulsory fees for seeing a GP, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/jan/12/peter-dutton-ranked-as-worst-health-minister-in-35-years-in-poll-of-doctors">doctors voted Dutton</a> “the worst health minister in 35 years”.
Dutton’s whole political career was built on law-and-order scare campaigns and racism, while hating unions and ruling for the rich. This is hardly unique among right-wing politicians, but Dutton brought a certain zeal that marked him out even among his appalling colleagues as a sociopathic thug who dreamt of imprisoning or deporting half the population. He has been at the forefront of every racist campaign in Australia for a decade or more.
In 2008, Dutton boycotted parliament so he wouldn’t be present as the official government apology was delivered to the Aboriginal Stolen Generations. In 2023, he led the racist campaign against the Voice.
In 2018, Dutton railed against “Sudanese gangs” in Victoria and said Melburnians were afraid to go out to restaurants due to violence perpetrated by South Sudanese people. This year, he tried again, saying Melburnians were afraid to go to the shops due to crime. On both occasions, the Liberals subsequently got thumped.
Dutton once said that Lebanese Muslim migration to Australia had been “a mistake”. He cheered on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, threatened to deport anyone who protested against it, promised to introduce support for Israel as a condition of Australian citizenship and pledged to stop any refugees from Gaza coming to Australia.
Dutton’s time as immigration and home affairs ministers from 2014 to 2021 cemented his reputation as a sadistic authoritarian. During this time, he presided over a cruel regime of offshore concentration camps in which asylum seekers were indefinitely detained, abused, beaten, raped and vilified. In many ways, Peter Dutton helped pioneer the cruel treatment of refugees and immigrants that has since taken hold in Europe and the US.
Such was his reputation that Dutton had to wheel out his wife to reassure the public that he was, in fact, a human being and “not a monster”. The memes were glorious, perfectly balancing the menace that Dutton represented with the ridicule this potato-headed mediocrity deserved.
From failing business school, to rolling his police car, Dutton has now crashed the LNP and his own Temu Trump political career. We can only hope for a climate change-induced cyclone or a youth crime spree to destroy his property portfolio and complete the schadenfreude. 
While Dutton’s loss is a setback for hard right politics in Australia for now, the right and the far right are far from dead. The conditions that give rise to them, and the capitalist forces that back them, are alive and well all around the world. 
What’s more, almost everyone Dutton spent his career punching down on is also being punched under the newly elected Labor government. Our goal must be to turn this repudiation of Dutton into a repudiation of the similarly right-wing agenda pursued by Anthony Albanese, who himself covets his “warm” relationship with Donald Trump.

Peter Dutton, a sad loser

In a <a href="https://www.afp.gov.au/news-centre/media-statement/afp-deputy-commissioner-national-security-krissy-barrett-statement">bombshell press conference</a> on 10 March, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and NSW Police shredded the entire story that we have been fed about a supposed tsunami of antisemitism gripping society and leading to a wave of violent attacks on Jewish people and property. It has all been based on a pack of lies, a “criminal con job”.
For more than a month, attention has been focused on the discovery in January of a <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/dural-caravan-nsw-police-find-explosives-in-caravan-synagogue-targeted-20250130-p5l87g.html">caravan in Dural, Sydney, filled with explosives</a>. It was described as a terrorist plot targeting a synagogue. We now know that it wasn’t.
“Almost immediately, experienced investigators within the Joint Counter Terrorism Team believed that the caravan was part of a fabricated terrorism plot—essentially a criminal con job”, AFP Deputy Commissioner National Security Krissy Barrett said. “Today, I can reveal that the caravan was never going to cause a mass casualty event but instead was concocted by criminals who wanted to cause fear for personal benefit.” 
For this reason, the police never classified the caravan as a terrorism incident. But that didn’t stop the politicians. On 30 January, NSW Premier Chris Minns <a href="https://www.pm.gov.au/media/radio-interview-abc-sydney-10">told ABC radio</a>: “This is the discovery of a potential mass casualty event. There’s only one way of calling it out and that is terrorism”. This is the exact opposite of what the police thought, in their own words, “almost immediately”. It is inconceivable that Minns did not know by this point that he was telling bald-faced lies. In the six weeks since, Minns has never corrected the record nor apologised for his dishonesty. 
In the same ABC interview, Anthony Albanese was asked, “Do you classify this as terrorism as well, prime minister?” He answered, “I certainly do. I agree with Chris Minns. It’s clearly designed to harm people, but it’s also designed to create fear in the community. And that is the very definition”. 
Except that the prime minister surely also knew that the police had immediate and serious doubts and believed it to be a “fake plot” with no plan nor prospect of the caravan or its cargo of 40-year-old explosives harming anyone.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton called it a “grave and sinister escalation in this insidious rise of unchecked antisemitism in our country”. He later <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2025/feb/06/australia-politics-news-live-labor-anti-hate-speech-laws-mandatory-sentences-federal-election-campaign-anthony-albanese-peter-dutton-ntwnfb">claimed</a> that it was “believed to be the biggest planned terrorist attack” in Australia’s history. 
None of this is true. 
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-11/burke-says-dutton-conned-by-caravan-hoax/105033778">accused</a> Dutton of deliberately avoiding police briefings so that he would have more freedom to “continue to make the most outrageous claims. He wanted to make sure that he could stoke the most fear”, Burke said. Dutton’s claims were outrageous, but so were those of Albanese and Minns, who cannot pretend they didn’t know the truth.
Beyond the caravan, the police said they believed all of the high-profile antisemitic attacks in recent times in Sydney, which have resulted in dozens of arrests under Operation Pearl, had a “common source” with the caravan plot. “The caravan job was orchestrated by the same individual or individuals that were orchestrating the Pearl incidents”, said NSW Police Deputy Commissioner David Hudson. “None of the individuals we have arrested during Pearl have displayed any form of antisemitic ideology”, he said.
This is an extraordinary revelation, although one that the police had been repeatedly theorising about in press statements for weeks. In the first press conference NSW police gave about the caravan, they speculated that it might be a “set-up”. This was ignored by politicians and the bulk of the media, who instead breathlessly reported that an antisemitic “terrorist” massacre “with a blast radius of 40 metres” had been imminent. 
Indeed, the biggest hoax has not been the one carried out by a few organised criminals looking for bargaining chips with the legal system. The main hoax, the biggest con job of all, has been carried out by the entire political and media establishment. They have cynically used this plot to whip up fear, suspicion and hatred for Muslims and Palestinians and the Palestine solidarity movement, to justify a hysterical witch-hunt and purge of Palestine supporters throughout many institutions, and to rush through a new set of draconian anti-protest laws.
This campaign was on full display at the recent Sky News
Antisemitism Summit, a conference of right-wing and far-right politicians, activists, media outlets and the pro-Israel lobby. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), Australia’s main pro-Israel lobby group, presented a <a href="https://www.ecaj.org.au/15-steps-to-defeat-antisemitism/">fifteen-point plan</a> for combating antisemitism, beginning with a call to “declare the existence of a National Emergency and establish a Joint Counter-Terrorism Taskforce [to] fight against antisemitic terror”. This was followed by a wish list of extreme censorship, attacks on free speech and the right to protest, and purges of pro-Palestine students and academics. 
ECAJ and other pro-Israel lobby groups, who routinely propagandise in support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and promote the dehumanisation of the Palestinian people, have been given tens of millions of dollars by the Australian government as part of its so-called campaign of combating antisemitism. Jewish organisations that are critical of Israel have not received a cent. 
The attempt to tie what has been confirmed as a criminal plot to the Palestine solidarity movement reached its zenith with the passing of a series of new <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/new-anti-protest-laws-target-opponents-of-genocide">anti-protest laws</a>, especially in NSW. The laws were justified with constant reference to the “antisemitic terror” gripping Australia. 
We now know that Minns, and at least several other senior ministers, clearly knew that they were rushing through these laws based on complete lies. Perhaps they were rushing to beat these revelations coming out. Not only were the attacks not motivated by antisemitism—being in fact, according to the police, a “criminal con job”. There was absolutely no link between these attacks and any protest activity.
Chris Minns must apologise to the people of NSW, and to the Palestine solidarity movement, for using lies and distortions to trample on our democratic rights. He should repeal these laws immediately, and he should resign.
Minns should also apologise to Jewish people in this state. Antisemitism is real and must be opposed, and the actions of these crooks caused legitimate fear among Jewish people. But Minns’ lies, along with those of the media and pro-Israel lobby, who have all made the most of this criminal hoax, have falsely portrayed these criminal acts as a result of a rising tide of antisemitism in society. 
They have deliberately exaggerated the threat posed to Jewish people in a reprehensible and cynical ploy to whip up fear in order to attack and silence opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They were, in effect, the accomplices in this entire hoax.

The great antisemitism con job

A raft of new laws, purportedly to combat the antisemitism “crisis” in Australia, have been passed federally and by some state governments. The Human Rights Law Centre <a href="https://www.hrlc.org.au/reports-news-commentary/2025/02/21/hate-speech">summed up</a> the situation, saying that the laws have “been introduced under the guise of protecting against hate speech and vilification [but] on closer inspection, these laws are likely to have a chilling effect on our democracy while failing to stamp out hate speech and discrimination”. 
The same political leaders who in sucking up to Donald Trump have refused to condemn his calls for ethnic cleansing in Gaza, or the recent Nazi salutes by Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, are now pontificating about “racist hate” to pass laws that undermine our democratic rights. This is occurring in the context of a McCarthyite-style witch-hunt of Palestine supporters across media, educational and cultural institutions.
At a federal level, the new laws mostly increase sentences for existing offences, while also introducing new offences of threatening to use force or violence against protected groups, and either advocating or threatening damage to, or destruction of, places of worship. The Labor government performed a spectacular backflip, capitulating to Peter Dutton and the Liberal opposition by including mandatory minimum sentences of up to six years’ imprisonment for some offences, while ramming through the legislation in less than 24 hours. This is despite Prime Minister Anthony Albanese just weeks earlier describing mandatory prison terms as “fraught” and “unproductive”. 
Mandatory sentencing explicitly goes against the Labor Party’s own official policy platform, given its disastrous history of resulting in mass incarceration of marginalised and oppressed people. This didn’t stop Albanese and every Labor MP voting for these laws.
In NSW, the Chris Minns Labor government has gone further, passing three new sets of laws. The first targets the display of Nazi symbols and graffiti near synagogues, Jewish schools or the Sydney Jewish Museum. The second and third are explicitly targeting protesters, despite there being no link between protests and the recent spate of antisemitic attacks—which the police have theorised were likely coordinated by organised crime networks.
The NSW government’s Crimes Amendment (Places of Worship) bill 2025 creates an offence with a potential two-year imprisonment and/or a $22,000 fine for blocking, impeding or hindering access to places of worship. It grants NSW police the extraordinary powers to arrest and move on people in or near a place of worship for any reason. As the NSW Council for Civil Liberties <a href="https://www.nswccl.org.au/news">argues</a>, “these offences could be used to charge members of the faith protesting their own organisation, sexual abuse survivors demanding justice and any snap rally or assembly that happens within a vicinity of a place of worship, such as Town Hall”. The laws are extraordinarily broad, especially given that almost everywhere in the Sydney CBD is “near” a place of worship, all of Sydney’s most common protest locations being close to a church. 
Minns has made no secret of the fact that he is a staunch supporter of Israel and wants to stamp out the mass Palestine movement that has mobilised tens of thousands against the genocide in Gaza for more than sixteen months. These laws follow a wave of other anti-protest laws passed in NSW in recent years, many targeting climate protesters, and could be used against people protesting for any cause, including the union movement.
The third law passed by Minns makes it a criminal offence to incite racial hatred, with a maximum penalty for an individual of two years’ imprisonment and/or fines of up to $11,000. In Victoria, new anti-vilification laws have also passed, although they include other protected categories besides race, and potentially some protections from the laws for political speech.
The danger of these laws is that a concerted effort is being made by supporters of Israel to define criticism of or opposition to the state of Israel as inherently antisemitic. Pro-Palestine activists have been falsely accused of antisemitism for decades to silence opposition. Now they want to make opposing Israel a crime. In a similar vein, Universities Australia recently adopted an official definition which says that calling for the abolition of the state of Israel is antisemitism, potentially opening up thousands of academics and students to disciplinary proceedings.
Decisions about who should be prosecuted under these laws will be in the hands of the police and public prosecutors—that is, the very institutions of power that uphold racist inequalities and the interests of Australian capitalism. For that reason, no-one should be under any illusion that these laws will be used to prosecute vicious racists like Peter Dutton, Sky News or the pro-Israel lobby, who have dehumanised the Palestinian people, supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza and systematically demonised the Arab and Muslim population. In fact, all these racists are clamouring for even more draconian “hate speech” laws to try to outlaw dissent. 
All progressive causes, including the union movement, should unite in opposing these undemocratic laws.

New anti-protest laws target opponents of genocide

US President Donald Trump has declared his intention to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its Palestinian population. Trump outlined his genocidal vision during a grotesque press conference, standing alongside a smirking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has overseen the massacre of at least 50,000 people in Gaza, and who has an International Criminal Court arrest warrant issued against him for war crimes.
Trump justified his calls for the annihilation of the Palestinian people from their homeland by describing the complete devastation that has been wrought on Gaza—devastation caused by the man grinning next to him, and by the US itself which has supplied Israel with the weaponry to destroy Gaza’s homes, hospitals, schools and all other civilian infrastructure.
As if ethnic cleansing wasn’t bad enough, Trump added his own billionaire-parasite twist, declaring that the US would “own” Gaza, and that he would turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East”. Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace put it succinctly: “Let’s turn Gaza into Mar-a-Lago”. 
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has kept his knee bent before the hard-right US president by refusing to condemn these open calls for genocide. Albanese said he “would not give a daily commentary on statements by the US President”. Even spineless world leaders who have been lining up to kiss Trump’s arse, like the UK’s Keir Starmer, have at least verbally rebuked his calls for ethnic cleansing. Not so Albanese, who is setting new standards for pathetic capitulation to the far right. 
Trump’s open support for the total removal of Palestinians from Gaza puts much of the political and media establishment in Australia and around the world in a bit of a quandary. They continued to support Israel through sixteen months of its genocide in Gaza, no matter how many children were massacred. They have dehumanised the Palestinian people and engaged in an escalating campaign of slandering, sacking and repressing those who speak up for the Palestinians, from journalists and academics to students and protest organisers. But most of this has happened under the official pretence that Israel was “defending itself”, accompanied by weasel words from former US President Joe Biden and Albanese pretending that they wanted peace and a two-state solution, and a compliant media who presented this fairytale as though it were real. Netanyahu knows this game well; he knows that to get away with genocide it’s best to deny that is what you’re doing.
Trump has shattered that pretence. He has said out loud what has been Israel and the US’s policy all along, obvious to anyone who wanted to see, yet officially denied: wiping out the Palestinian people. That’s what the last sixteen months have been about, and the US and Australia have provided the arms to do it.
The media’s reaction has been mixed, reflecting this quandary of how to deal with a US president who makes it harder to justify the rotten system we live in. Rupert Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph ran an opinion piece titled “Can Trump’s plan to level Gaza finally bring peace?”. Pondering about whether genocide equals peace was a bridge too far for most, though, who have instead tried to reassure us that Trump’s statements are “outlandish” and unrealisable. 
But the genocide in Gaza is not outlandish. It has been happening. And Trump’s statements have effectively ripped up the ceasefire deal and given Netanyahu the green light to resume the slaughter in coming months. They must be stopped.

Trump spells out plan for ethnic cleansing in Gaza

Another year on, and the dismal government of Anthony Albanese has continued to deliver nothing much. Having begun its life with about as much mojo as a koala, the government has spent 2024 as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s yes-man. Albanese’s political strategy resembles a 1-2 combination of Joe Biden and Mike Tyson—rule for the rich, screw your supporters, throw the match and walk away with a $4.3 million mansion. 
Albanese came to power in 2022 on the back of the unpopularity of the dysfunctional Scott Morrison Coalition government. In contrast to the Coalition, which was plagued with infighting, obsessed with culture wars and losing seats to the Teals, Labor presented itself as the “sensible centre”, the “adults in the room”. To the ruling class it promised, in Albanese’s words, an “unashamedly pro-business government”. At the same time, most workers hoped Labor might do something to make life a little easier, and progressives hoped for some sort of progress on climate action.
The Liberal Party was in disarray, but the 2022 election was far from a smashing victory for Labor. The ALP recorded one of its weakest results in history, with a primary vote of just 32 percent. In the years since, Labor’s support has steadily eroded, and the government has become increasingly weak and inclined to run for cover. Dutton, the man whose wife once had to clarify to media that he was in fact a human being and “not a monster”, is now competitive in the polls and setting the political agenda.
Living standards have gone backwards at record rates under Labor
The main factor in all this has been Labor’s failure to take any serious measures to address the cost-of-living crisis. 
High inflation has reduced real disposable household incomes by a whopping 10 percent since 2021, more than any other OECD country and the worst fall in Australia in more than 50 years. While supermarkets and energy companies price-gouge their way to soaring profits, Albanese has done nothing to rein them in. While banks and landlords make the cost of housing impossibly expensive, Labor introduces tokenistic schemes like the Housing Australia Future Fund, which after more than a year of operation will have contributed to just 700 new “affordable” homes.
Worse still, the government has presided over a range of measures to increase the squeeze on working-class households. These include scrapping the low to middle income tax offset, which was worth up to $1,500 for people earning up to $90,000, keeping minimum wage growth below the rate of inflation, and huge interest rate rises. Following the playbook of governments around the world, the interest rate rises were explicitly designed to cut the income and spending of the population, while slowing economic growth and driving up unemployment, in order to combat inflation. In other words, making the working class pay for the economy’s problems.
Meanwhile, Labor governments at federal and state levels have maintained a hard line on public sector wages. And if workers step out of line, demand proper pay rises and take industrial action, as Woolworths warehouse workers have been doing, they soon come up against draconian laws, upheld by the Labor government, restricting and banning strikes and picketing.
It’s not as though Labor weren’t throwing money around when it wanted to. Military spending increased to a record $55.7 billion in this year’s budget. Tax cuts, which mostly benefited the rich, are forecast to cost $100 billion over four years. Another $50 billion is given away every year in the form of capital gains tax discounts and negative gearing concessions, mostly to wealthy investors and property developers. A further $14.5 billion went in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry last year. This is 10 times the amount the government spent to give everyone a measly $300 rebate on their energy bill.
By January 2024, <a href="https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/shock-poll-we-dont-trust-albo-to-help-us-with-costs-of-living/news-story/e8b7e7b39bedcd2e4c8d14746d6c0a50?amp&amp;nk=ca4b05041b50440fb106b0a6a7873d34-1705729334">polling</a>
was showing that a big majority (71 percent) considered the cost of living to be their main concern, followed by housing (41 percent). Eighty percent believed the government had failed to address the cost-of-living crisis. More than half thought the country was heading in the wrong direction. While inflation has now come down, the damage done over the last few years has by no means been reversed.
While workers have gone backwards, Forbes reports that “despite a weaker Australian dollar, Australia’s 50 Richest on the 2024 list are better off from a year ago. Their collective wealth rose by US$9 billion to $222 billion, from $213 billion in 2023.” The overall share of national income going to profits, instead of wages, remains at record highs. This explains why the ruling class, and the media, have not turned against the Albanese government.
No progress, only spin, failure and regression on social issues
Labor’s progressive supporters have experienced another year of being kicked in the teeth. On climate policy, Albanese has approved another 28 coal and gas projects since being elected. This has exposed the big scam that was Labor’s flagship “safeguard mechanism” climate policy in 2023, which was touted as “ending the climate wars”, and even celebrated by the Greens, whose leader Adam Bandt claimed that “coal and gas have taken a huge hit”. In fact, the policy was adopted from the Business Council of Australia, and backed by the mining and gas companies, which, in 2023, exported the equivalent of another 1.15 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
Albanese ended 2024 by tearing up a separate deal with the Greens on “nature positive legislation”, at the behest of the Western Australia Labor government, which in turn was doing the bidding of mining companies, and rushing through approval for another three coal mines.
The Albanese government’s climate policy has been based on giving the mining and gas companies whatever they want, while trying to deceive the public that some progress on tackling carbon emissions is occurring, through industrial-scale greenwashing, accounting tricks and fake carbon offsets. Meanwhile energy bills soar. This fuels the cynicism and resentment that Dutton capitalises on to deride the “green agenda” and to blame it for high energy prices. 
Labor’s pro-business approach has been matched by a general political strategy of wanting to avoid any fight with the right about social questions. From his small-target strategy in opposition, Albanese now wants to lead a small-target government. 
Labor supported the Voice referendum only because the proposal was backed by big business and, initially, seemed uncontroversial. The success of Dutton’s racist “no” campaign, which Labor couldn’t stand up to, weakened Albanese further and reinforced his determination to avoid any controversy and, in particular, criticism from the right.
This has led to Labor jumping to adopt increasingly reactionary policies. One particularly pathetic example was Albanese’s move to break an election promise and scrap questions about sexual orientation and gender identity in the national census, only to backflip two weeks later. Here was Labor pre-emptively capitulating to a right-wing culture war that didn’t even exist.
The government’s extreme response to the construction union, the CFMEU, after allegations of corruption aired in the media, probably fits somewhere in Albanese’s Venn diagram between servitude to big business and terror of being criticised by the right, in this case for being too close to the unions. Labor’s complete government takeover of the union and sacking of officials, including in branches not subject to allegations of corruption, is a major attack on one of the few unions perceived still to use workers’ industrial muscle to win decent wages and conditions.
Then we have Labor’s despicable lurch to the right on questions of immigration and refugees, even to the point of trying to out-compete Dutton as “tougher” on denying human rights and deporting people. US President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral success will only encourage Dutton to adopt even more extreme racist, anti-refugee and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Rather than blaming the billionaires, immigrants have always been the perfect scapegoat for cost-of-living pressures, unemployment and non-existent crime waves. 
Labor has gone along with this argument, culminating in its rush to pass a trio of hideous new anti-refugee bills, in agreement with the Coalition, in the last sitting days of parliament for 2024. In spruiking the bills, Albanese attacked Dutton from the right, saying, “On Peter Dutton’s watch, there was a huge spike in the number of protection visa applications onshore”.
These extreme new laws allow the government to bribe countries to accept deportees from Australia, regardless of their human rights credentials. They make it harder for asylum seekers to get protection visas and allow the Australian government to ban new visa applications from countries that do not accept forced deportations from Australia, which many have labelled a Trump-style travel ban. And they ramp up the isolation and hellish treatment of those in immigration detention, with bans on phones, and more powers to impose ankle bracelets and curfews on anyone released.
After the laws passed, shadow immigration minister Dan Tehan boasted that the Coalition is now “basically running the immigration system for the government”. And he is not wrong. 
Albanese punches down
While cosying up to big business and out-competing Dutton on racism, there have been some fights Albanese has embraced with passion and verve—against anyone to his left.
Lashing the Greens has become Labor’s favourite pastime. They have labelled straightforward housing proposals like a rent freeze, which the Greens advocate and which have majority support, as “absolute pixie dust”. They have denounced Greens MPs for “grandstanding” by supporting the CFMEU. Most of all, they have attacked the Greens for supporting Palestinian rights. In language you never see Labor politicians use against the right, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, without any evidence, said the Greens “engage in violent and aggressive protests and incite them”. 
This from the government that is continuing to back, including militarily, a state that is committing what even Amnesty International now describes as genocide, led by a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has an arrest warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. You won’t find any strong words of condemnation or denunciation from any Labor politician of Israel or its actions in Gaza. Indeed, the only Labor politician who did begin to offer such criticism, Fatima Payman, was driven out of the party. But there’s been plenty of moral outrage, and repression, directed at those who have protested these crimes.
Albanese won’t fight the right, but he will bravely take on children. Labor governments at federal and state level have either led, or gone along with, hysterical law and order campaigns, often directed against Aboriginal children. And now they are banning social media access for under-16s, while doing nothing to actually regulate or take on the big media and social media barons.
Where to from here?
The Labor government is leading our society into a very bleak situation. It has carried out the ruling class’s wish to get inflation under control by sacrificing working-class living standards and job security. The resentment felt by millions, combined with the government’s right-wing stance on issue after issue, is helping pave the way for Dutton.
Around the world similar stories have played out, whereby centrist governments, overseeing growing inequality and pursuing anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, have fuelled the right and far right. Most recently, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris led to Donald Trump. In the UK, the Keir Starmer Labor government is already tanking in the polls, with a huge growth in support for the Conservatives and the far right. In several countries in Europe, social democratic parties have collapsed and far-right governments have come to power.
The Labor Party may still cling to power in the next election, propped up as a minority government by the Greens, which seems increasingly happy to play this role. Despite Albanese’s best efforts, Dutton is still widely unpopular. But whether it’s Albanese screwing the working class and championing right-wing policies, or the monster Dutton, it remains the case that what is desperately needed is stronger socialist opposition to the rotten Labor Party and the system it represents.

All we’ve got from the Albanese government is Peter Dutton

There has been a renewed attack on the right to protest in NSW, led by NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns, in conjunction with the NSW Liberal Party and a right-wing media campaign designed to smear the Palestine solidarity movement. 
The campaign began with sections of the media hyperventilating about the presence of some Hezbollah flags at our Sydney protest on 29 September. It worked itself up into a full-blown moral panic about anyone daring to discuss the 42,000+ Palestinians killed by Israel in the past year, on the anniversary of 7 October. 
Although Israel was invading Lebanon and continuing a year-long genocidal rampage in Gaza, it was us, those protesting against the slaughter, who were labelled terrorist supporters, violent, insensitive and a threat to “social cohesion”.
For the Australian establishment, only Israelis can be mourned. According to them, there is no such thing as a Palestinian victim who deserves to have their life remembered and honoured—they are only Hamas terrorists and human shields. 
The campaign culminated in the NSW police, under orders from Minns, taking the Palestine Action Group Sydney to the Supreme Court to try to stop our protest on 6 October and a candlelight vigil on 7 October from going ahead. The arguments of the police and prosecutors were farcical and drew on long-established racist stereotypes, particularly about Lebanese people. They tried to concoct an image of violent, terrorist-sympathising mobs. 
At one point, they claimed that flower beds in planter boxes posed a safety risk. At another, they argued that a protest route, which they themselves had proposed to protest organisers at a previous meeting, went too near a Sydney synagogue. Later, they argued that the protest should be banned because all the publicity, generated by their own court challenge, meant it would be bigger than expected! In the end, the police withdrew their application to stop us from marching.
But they mobilised an obscenely large mob of police who were itching for any excuse to make arrests to justify the hysterical anti-protest panic. Hundreds of riot police were sent to surround and intimidate a candlelight vigil. Despite this, both events were massive and successful, and the police and government were left with egg on their faces at the lack of “violent terrorists” they could invent.
Chris Minns, not one to let a good law-and-order panic go to waste, then went on 2GB radio with shock jock Ben Fordham (where Minns seemingly makes most of his policy announcements) to complain about the cost—supposedly $5.4 million this year—of policing our protests. As if it were our decision to send hundreds of cops to a candlelight vigil! 
“I’m going to have a review into the resourcing that police put into these marches, and it’s my view that police should be able to be in a position to deny a request for a march due to stretched police resourcing”, he said. Minns has also appeared to endorse the idea of Liberal opposition leader Mark Speakman that a “user pays” system should be introduced, whereby protesters are forced to pay the costs of the police. Besides being a general attack on protests, this proposal would create a perverse situation in which the rich could protest but not the poor.
Minns also personally singled me out as a “serial protester”, prompting the baying bloodhounds of Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph to write an attempted <a href="https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/serial-propalestine-rally-organiser-josh-lees-received-covid-fines-after-campaigning-to-lock-down-nsw/news-story/ec8d90ca4fe038838fde4148f6c4ff65">hit piece</a> on my history of protest, presumably based on information leaked to them by NSW Police.
At our protest on 13 October, two 19-year-old women from Students for Palestine were arrested, had their bags searched, were given move-on orders to leave the protest and were told they would receive infringement notices in the mail. Their “crime”? Putting up a poster on a pole in Hyde Park to advertise a protest.
These threats to our right to protest are just the latest in a long line of authoritarian laws adopted in recent years. The Human Rights Legal Centre <a href="https://www.hrlc.org.au/news/2024/07/03/protest-peril">reports</a>: “Over the past two decades, 49 laws affecting protest have been introduced in federal, state and territory parliaments. New South Wales has introduced the most anti-protest laws”.
In 2022, the NSW Liberal and Labor parties teamed up to pass the Roads and Crimes Act, which introduced two years’ jail and/or a $22,000 fine for anyone found to be disrupting bridges, tunnels, major roads, train stations, ports and public and private infrastructure. The laws targeted climate protesters but can be used against anyone. Last year, they were used to charge Palestine solidarity protesters attempting to blockade Israeli shipping company Zim at Port Botany.
It has become common police practice to impose insanely strict bail conditions on protesters, even when the alleged offence is minor and would attract only a fine if proven. These conditions often include exclusion zones around the CBD or potential protest sites like universities, bans on attending future protests, and even bans on associating with other activists. The latter powers were supposedly introduced to help NSW police deal with criminal gangs. They are now routinely used against protesters.
Every movement in history has had to contend with the repressive state apparatus, which is devoted to maintaining the “cohesion” of the current, unequal, unjust and murderous social order. The best way to fight for the right to protest is to protest, in bigger numbers than ever.
Josh Lees is an organiser with the Palestine Action Group Sydney.

NSW assault on the right to protest

One year ago, Israel began its genocidal bloodbath in Gaza. As the bodies of men, women and so many children piled up, ripped apart by bombs made in the USA, everyone was called on to answer the question: “Which side are you on?”.
Governments of every stripe, from the far right in Italy and Argentina, to the Democrat and Labor administrations of the US and Australia, and the Arab dictatorships and monarchies of the Middle East, chose the side of genocide. Weapons companies kept the ammunition and profits flowing. The Australian media became mouthpieces of Israeli state propaganda. Palestinians whose families were being annihilated were either ignored or asked only one question: “Do you condemn Hamas?”.
But against the tide, a new movement rose. It started with those of us who had been organising in solidarity with Palestine for many years. In Sydney, we in the Palestine Action Group started making calls and by 9 October we had 2,000 people on the streets. Within a few days, protests were occurring in every major city.
We had organised protests against Israel’s previous massacres in Gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018 and 2021. But none of us predicted just how bloodthirsty Israel would be this time. And none of us knew that we were kicking off a movement that would mobilise thousands of people every week, for 52 weeks, to demand freedom for Palestine. If there is one ray of hope amongst all the horror of the past year, it’s that millions of ordinary people have defiantly taken a stand with this movement for liberation.
No sooner had we taken to the streets than the attacks on us began. The script was familiar: we were labelled antisemites. The Jewish organisations and individuals who participated in every protest were erased from the media narrative. In NSW, Labor Premier Chris Minns lit up the Opera House with the colours of Israel’s flag and then declared that our protests would be banned. Police threatened the use of extraordinary powers to crack down on us, and even forcibly strip-search protesters. Peter Dutton called for protesters to be deported. It took real bravery for people to mobilise in the face of all that, but on 15 October, 15,000 people demonstrated that we could not be intimidated into silence.
The centrepiece of this movement has been the nationwide mass weekly or fortnightly protests. They have been the biggest rallies for Palestine in Australian history. In Melbourne and Sydney, upwards of 60,000 people have mobilised, with huge numbers out in Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide and Canberra. Even smaller cities and towns like Wollongong, Newcastle, Cairns and Katoomba have held regular protests, attracting hundreds.
These sustained mobilisations have kept Palestine at the centre of Australian political debate, piling pressure on our rotten politicians, drawing huge numbers into the cause for the first time, giving confidence and inspiration to all who come that we are on the right side of history, and showing the people of Gaza that we are with them, even if our governments are not.
Crucially, the protests have mobilised far larger numbers of non-Arabs and non-Muslims than the Palestine movement had previously. It is a testament to the argument that ordinary people, regardless of their background, are capable of rejecting racism and standing in solidarity with oppressed people. 
The mass protests have created the foundation for countless other actions to be organised in the past year: occupations of train stations, pickets at weapons companies, attempted blockades of ports, convoys to Canberra, protests and sit-ins at Albanese’s office, hundreds of vigils, plays and film-screenings, actions aimed at local councils and much more.
Students have played a big part. High school socialists in Melbourne organised the biggest school strike for Palestine in the world last November, and students elsewhere followed suit. Students for Palestine kicked off the Gaza solidarity encampment movement on Australian universities, setting up the first camp at Sydney University in April, before it spread to twelve other campuses. 
A wave of huge student general meetings has been held at campuses around the country, mobilising 1,500 people at the University of Queensland and several hundred in other places. The immense majorities voting for pro-Palestine motions are extraordinary and demonstrate how large support for Palestine is amongst young people.
Everywhere people have tried to express their opposition to the genocide, they have come up against institutions that try to repress them. Journalists Antoinette Lattouf and Nour Haydar were sacked for reporting the truth. Fatima Payman was driven out of the Labor Party. Pro-Palestine school students and teachers have faced off against principals and education departments, demanding their right to wear the keffiyeh. Actors and musicians from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra to the Sydney Theatre Company have been punished for taking a stand. Many trade union members have campaigned against their union leaders to take a stronger stance in support of Palestine. University students and staff are currently facing a concerted right-wing campaign to silence them. Recent protests against the arms convention in Melbourne were met with police violence. Yet still, we resist.
As the genocide grinds on and Israel escalates its violence in Lebanon, there are precious few victories for us to celebrate. But all of us who have thrown ourselves into the fight to stand against this descent into hell should be proud of what we have done. There are thousands and thousands of people who are more committed than ever to free Palestine and tear down this barbaric system, and we aren’t done yet.

Still fighting for Palestine, one year on

Fresh from driving Fatima Payman out of the Labor Party, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has now appointed Jillian Segal, former president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), a rabid pro-Israel lobby group, as “special envoy to combat antisemitism”. The role has nothing to do with combatting antisemitism and everything to do with silencing opponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
“We have been blessed to live in a country with no history of antisemitic laws or institutional persecution of Jewish Australians, but the world is changing”, Segal said soon after getting the job. In fact, Australia was rife with antisemitic persecution for decades, including under the racist “White Australia” immigration laws, which excluded Jews. And antisemitic far-right groups are active today and are growing globally. 
But this stuff doesn’t much concern Segal because her appointment isn’t about challenging racism; it’s about stoking it.
Segal and ECAJ have <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/07/10/jillian-segal-antisemitism-envoy-labor-banking-nab-israel-palestine/">campaigned</a> against a ceasefire in Gaza, <a href="https://www.ecaj.org.au/ecaj-zfa-joint-statement-on-foreign-minister-penny-wongs-abc-insiders-comments/">justified</a> bombing hospitals, <a href="https://everythingisfine.beehiiv.com/p/jillian-segal-right-wing-peak-bodies-and-zionist-antisemitism">repeated</a> false claims about babies being beheaded on 7 October, and lobbied for student protesters to be persecuted. In her own words, speaking at a pro-Israel rally in May, Segal said she wants to “drive anti-Zionism and antisemitism back into the darkest and most disreputable corners of our society”. 
Of course, the way for organisations such as ECAJ to oppose anti-Zionism is to equate it with antisemitism, so that any criticism of Israel can be dismissed, and the critics can be accused of racist hate speech.
It is such a familiar tactic that it barely needs to be explained for the sham that it is. It has been deployed so often and so ludicrously that it is having less and less impact in cowing people who want to stop the genocide and support Palestinian liberation. 
But a real threat lurks behind this appointment, which is the increasingly repressive environment for anti-genocide activists around the world. Segal will use her position to campaign for Australia to adopt the extreme anti-democratic measures we have seen in places like Germany and the UK, where pro-Palestine protesters, including many Jewish anti-Zionists, are being routinely <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/1/we-jews-are-just-arrested-palestinians-are-beaten-german-protesters">arrested</a> under the preposterous pretext of inciting racial hatred.
Similar moves have already begun in Australia. A Melbourne activist now <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/palestinian-activist-hash-tayeh-told-he-will-be-arrested-for-inciting-hatred-20240711-p5jsrv.html">faces arrest</a>, and many student protesters are facing university discipline for criticising Zionism. And there are threats to ban chants such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”.
This leads us to the crux of the issue. When it comes to racial hatred, there is no form more extreme than genocide. It is, in the words of the Genocide Convention, an attempt to destroy “in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. 
The practice of genocide goes well beyond words and hate speech, although is inevitably accompanied by odious racist ideology. It is killing on a vast scale, mass terror, ethnic cleansing and the destruction of the physical and social preconditions of life. It’s what Israel has been doing for nine months.
Every week, another atrocity is revealed. Surgeons working in Gaza have <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/11/israeli-weapons-shrapnel-children-gaza-injured">described</a> the huge numbers of shrapnel injuries they are treating, leading to horrific numbers of civilian deaths, amputations and other internal injuries. They result from the kinds of shells and bombs Israel is dropping on residential areas and refugee camps, where the main munition is encased with a fragmentation sleeve consisting of hundreds of tiny tungsten cubes that explode in every direction, shredding organs and bones. The only reason to use such weapons is to kill and injure as many people as possible. They are being killed because they are Palestinian.
Beyond the 38,345 people counted as killed by the Gaza Health Ministry, a <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext">letter</a> published in the journal of the British Medical Association estimates that the real death toll could be more than 186,000, or 7.9 percent of the pre-October Gaza population. Add to this the tens of thousands who have been forced to flee Gaza altogether (and who have been able to make it out), and this amounts to a significant depopulation of the Strip, one which Israel seems intent on continuing via ongoing massacres, blockade and starvation. Meanwhile, Israel carries out its biggest <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/04/israel-has-approved-largest-west-bank-land-grab-in-30-years-watchdog-says">land theft</a> in 30 years in the West Bank.
This is what Israel is perpetrating in Gaza—an immense slaughter, an ethnic cleansing, the worst possible form of racist crime: genocide. Then there are those outside of Israel helping to enable and justify this racist atrocity, like the Australian government, the various Israel lobby groups, the corporate media. 
They <a href="https://overland.org.au/2024/07/you-dont-end-racism-with-envoys/">systematically dehumanise</a> the Palestinian people, erase and delegitimise their suffering, oppression and aspirations for liberation. This, in turn, fosters <a href="https://islamophobia.com.au/publications/press-releases/">racist abuse</a> and discrimination against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims in Australia. Moreover, the government signs a $917 million military deal with Elbit Systems, an Israeli manufacturer of fragmentation shells, to help kill more Palestinians. 
This is the main form of racism we confront in Australia today: support for genocide.

Labor’s ‘special envoy’ to promote racism and genocide

Western Australian federal Senator Fatima Payman has resigned from the Labor Party after being indefinitely suspended from the caucus and purged from party committees and communications. Her crime? Crossing the Senate floor to support a Greens motion to recognise Palestinian statehood. 
As Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather put it, “This Labor gov has done more to sanction Fatima Payman than Israel for committing a genocide”. 
“My family did not flee from a war-torn country to come here as refugees for me to remain silent when I see atrocities inflicted on innocent people”, Payman said. “Not just on this matter, but various matters that Western Australians have raised with me, from incarceration rates of Indigenous people, to locking up kids as young as ten years old, from the rising cost of living pressures to families living in cars and tents due to the housing crisis.” 
Payman’s resignation highlights, yet again, the contemptible role played by the Albanese Labor government over the last nine months of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. Labor has rhetorically called for a ceasefire, but on all matters of substance has backed Israel’s genocidal campaign, justifying it as Israel “defending itself”. It has continued to sign deals with Israeli weapons companies, allowed hundreds of Israeli-Australians to participate in the atrocities by fighting with the Israeli military and refused to back international efforts to put pressure on Israel through the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court. 
The responses to Payman’s resignation speak volumes about the vacuous, heartless establishment machine that is the modern ALP. Anonymous Labor sources immediately floated that maybe Payman is ineligible to sit in parliament due to her Afghan background—a particularly nasty notion given that her family fled Afghanistan as refugees. 
Concerning the Senate vote that sparked Payman’s exit, Labor has tried to argue that it also supports “recognising Palestine” but only as part of a peace process and two-state solution. This only demonstrates what deliberately meaningless phrases these are. There is no peace process; Israel is committing genocide, and no one in the Israeli government or opposition supports the creation of a Palestinian state.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong tried a different angle to attack Payman, thinking that reminding everyone of Labor’s long refusal to support marriage equality—and her own appalling stance during those years—might be a winner. “Even when we disagree, we have those arguments internally, as you saw over many years in the marriage equality debate”. Wong told ABC Radio’s AM program. “That’s what I did, and I think that’s the right way to go about it.”
Underlining this argument is the idea that real change comes from behind closed doors, through polite lobbying, patience and faith in incremental progress within the ALP. This argument has been raised not just by Wong but also by parts of the left in recent years, and more recently in the Palestine campaign, with some saying we should celebrate and give platforms to ALP figures such as Ged Kearney, who claim to be fighting for change inside the party even when they consistently toe the party line and vote for every reactionary bill. We couldn’t possibly demand they cross the floor, one argument goes, because Labor’s rules don’t permit it.
Payman’s stance has blown these arguments out of the water, and exposed all these other Labor politicians as careerist hacks. Not one of them has come to Payman’s defence. The Palestine campaign has been absolutely right to refuse to platform Labor politicians who won’t break ranks with Albanese. We haven’t met them halfway; we have drawn a line in the sand and demanded they pick which side of history they want to stand on. 
Payman herself credits the student Gaza solidarity camps for making her realise she needed to break ranks with Labor. When she visited the camps, she was greeted not with scones and grovelling but with plenty of anger at Labor politicians who were supporting Israel’s genocide.
Payman’s current stance is a result of our mass protest movement over these past nine months. Her crossing the floor is a step forward and has done more for the Palestine cause in Australia than anything Penny Wong ever did for marriage equality. In fact, marriage equality was won through years of mass protests and was finally enshrined under a Coalition government—no thanks to Labor and the likes of Wong. 
There is no incremental progress in today’s world, if ever there was. We are surrounded by the rise of the racist and fascist right, climate destruction, falling living standards and genocide. Labor is on the wrong side of every question. Change, including Palestinian liberation, will come only through mass defiance of the whole system that Labor supports.

Won’t somebody think of poor Israel?

Peter Dutton, a sad loser

The great antisemitism con job

New anti-protest laws target opponents of genocide

Trump spells out plan for ethnic cleansing in Gaza

All we’ve got from the Albanese government is Peter Dutton

NSW assault on the right to protest

Still fighting for Palestine, one year on

Labor’s ‘special envoy’ to promote racism and genocide

A principled resignation from the Australian Genocide Party

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