Police in Victoria last week arrested a woman over unprovoked attacks against two Muslim women wearing hijabs in a northern suburbs shopping centre near Epping.
Speaking about the incidents after they were reported, Prime Minister Albanese said it “would be inappropriate to comment” because police were investigating.
That is as it should be. There should be no commentary on the matter until the woman under arrest faces court, and a decision is made as to what she is charged with and whether she is guilty or innocent of the charge.
What the PM enunciated was a principle that goes by various names; due process and procedural fairness are two of them. Neither of those principles were observed following a Ripponlea synagogue fire in December. Nor were they followed when a truck loaded with old explosives and a list of synagogue addresses was discovered in Sydney’s Dural; or when a group of Jewish women were egged by a car full of young boys in Bondi; or when a video by an Israeli influencer and two Bankstown nurses went viral.
In each case, public figures called the incidents antisemitic and demanded swift action. Police have since found the Dural couple may have been hired to perpetrate antisemitic activities such as spray painting hateful messages but they were not ideologically motivated, and the troublesome Bondi boys had no idea that the women they egged were Jewish. They were all changed with offences unrelated to antisemitism.
Although the police are investigating the Bankstown video incident, the nurses have been stood down from their jobs and been widely condemned, with Albanese calling the heavily edited video “sickening and shameful”. A coalition of Muslim organisations expressly refrained from defending the nurses, but noted a “selective outrage” at work. They described a statement they issued as “pushing back against the double standards and moral manipulation at play while the mass killing of our brothers and sisters in Gaza is met with silence, dismissal, or complicity”.
The police in Victoria have yet to make a public finding on the perpetrator of the Ripponlea fire which badly damaged an Adass synagogue belonging to an ultra-orthodox Jewish religious group that adopts a neutral, rather than a supportive, attitude to the political state of Israel.
If the offender in the Epping case faces charges and the charges include a hate offence, the media would be likely to take an interest because she would be the first person charged with that crime since it was hastily enacted in February. Hate crimes are not a peculiar offence in themselves; indeed, they are much like any assault offence under the criminal code, with one significant difference: they carry a mandatory custodial provision that ties the hands of the presiding judge and precludes the court from taking mitigating factors into account.
Under the same pressure that saw Albanese hastily appoint an antisemitism envoy with much ado, he overrode advice from Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to steer away from attaching a mandatory sentencing provision to hate crime convictions. Dreyfus would have put the standard arguments to the PM that mandatory sentencing undermines the independence of the judiciary and often leads to unjust outcomes, such as imprisoning people who are mentally ill. It also contravenes longstanding Labor Party policy.
Pressure to take such a seemingly tough stand also came via the Coalition leader Peter Dutton, who called for extreme measures that included offenders being deported. The fact that such measures are in violation of existing law does not diminish their political impact. Credulous voters can be easily persuaded by strongly worded pronouncements from populist leaders, supported by a rabid tabloid press, that swift justice measures are appropriate, even if they contravene the rule of law.
Albanese’s “strong” stand included the calling of a snap National Cabinet meeting, but it was still not sufficiently robust for his critics, and fell well short of the more muscular demands made by his political opponent, showing again that the PM fails to understand that Dutton’s appetite for vindictiveness is insatiable. By engaging with Dutton’s strong-man game on his terms, the PM is certain to lose. What he needed to have done was to have been brave enough to firmly tell the Australian people how the law works in Australia, and that due process is part of our legal system going back many generations.
It’s a cliché, but in hindsight there is some truth in the observation that fortune favours the brave. Whatever qualities of character Albanese might possess, bravery is not one of them.
By contrast, Dutton is bouncing boldly into an election with an uncosted nuclear power fantasy headlining his policy list, followed by taxpayer-funded long lunches for the lions of business, and a vague promise that he will emulate Donald Trump’s abandonment of woke diversity, equity and inclusion principles as they apply to as much of the public service that he doesn’t dispatch to oblivion.
Adding to Dutton’s shameless pluck, were false assertions he made last week about the government fast-tracking Gazan visas. While the assertions were without foundation, there was a time not long ago when Australia welcomed people fleeing war zones, even if they were not war zones to which we contributed through supply of munitions and silent complicity.
The wash-up is that while Dutton is out there empty-handed displaying his unshakeable nerve, Labor’s standard impulse is to retreat under fire rather than engage in courageous defiance, and by now it’s an impulse hardwired into its political DNA. Were it not so, Labor’s fortunes could look much more hopeful as it heads into a problematic election that it’s widely tipped to lose, largely because the nation’s leader embodies faint-hearted traits that command no respect on either side of the political aisle.
If only Labor had been sufficiently brave to campaign during the May 2022 election on energy, corruption and gender equity rather than leaving it to the Climate 200 independents to do the heavy lifting on its behalf.
If only the Labor Government had been brave enough to stand firmly by the High Court in 2023 when it decided indefinite detention of refugees was illegal, rather than passing hasty draconian laws to restrict the freedom of released refugees and validate Dutton’s Trumpy assertions that the detainees were murderers, rapists and paedophiles. Albanese could have made something, but didn’t, of the reports commissioned by Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil that detailed the scandalous visa negligence of her predecessor that enabled entry of criminals engaged in human trafficking and sexual slavery, along with multi-billion dollar contracts casually handed out to unqualified Liberal Party donors such as Paladin and Canstruct.
If only Albanese had been sufficiently brave to stand beside Senator Fatima Payman in June 2024 when she gave notice that she would be following Labor Party policy by calling publicly on Australia to recognise the state of Palestine. Instead, the PM flew into high dudgeon to placate NewsCorp and the Coalition, allowed the lowly senator to depart to the crossbench, and by the time his temper tantrum cooled he had lost the soul of the Labor Party.
From that moment, Dutton had Albanese on a tether. Having abandoned Payman to avoid the wrath of the antisemitism lobby, he has never been able to do enough to please his opponent’s insatiable appetite for upping the ante on the Gaza conflict. While Albanese was fighting an internal battle with a little-known Labor senator, Dutton was depicting himself as fighting a holy war between good and evil, with Israel on the side of good and every Palestinian man, woman and child in Gaza on the side of evil. Dutton’s support for Netanyahu’s collective punishment of Palestinian civilians could, therefore, be portrayed in the NewsCorp-led media as the Coalition offering “moral clarity”, while Albanese’s offering of nuance and ambiguity could easily be depicted as pussyfooting timidity. As it was, and still is.
To be sure, the Gaza conflict aside, Albanese’s Labor Government has achieved a great deal in two and a half years. A short list includes its overhaul of stage three tax cuts to support working families, not just the wealthy. It has invested more in social housing than any federal government this century, restored the single parent payment to $176.90 a fortnight, criminalised wage theft, got real wages growing for the first time in a decade, invested in Medicare by creating 103,000 more bulk billed GP visits for children and pensioners, expanded paid parental leave, and funded pay rises for skilled workers in aged care and early childhood education.
To those largely unrecognised achievements within Australia’s legacy media, could be added the mending of fractured relations with our Pacific neighbours, and travel to China to win back $20 billion of trade lost during Dutton’s anti-China rhetoric when he was in government. Instead of celebrating those successes, the legacy media supported Dutton by characterising them as “Airbus Albo” on a frolic.
None of those lost opportunities for getting due credit might have come to pass had Albanese taken on News Corp in 2022 instead of bending the knee to Lachlan Murdoch at a secretive meeting in Holt Street that yielded him nothing. At the time, August 2022, News International was still recovering from the 2012 Leveson Inquiry in Britain that put Murdoch out of the bidding for BSkyB. In the US, Dominion and Smartmatic were in the throes of pursuing Fox News for billions of dollars over its 2020 election lies, and Prince Harry and Sir Tom Watson were beginning actions against News Group Newspapers that ended up winning them abject apologies for the damage they caused, along with handsome payouts. In addition, Murdoch was being pursued by multiple aggrieved employees and victims of his tabloid papers and television outlets, to whom he had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to buy their silence through non-disclosure agreements.
May 2022 would have been an opportune time to give Murdoch another problem, but the golden opportunity was lost. Albanese had plenty of domestic support for taking action, with a 500,000-signature petition for a Murdoch Royal Commission, a Zoe Daniel motion in the House of Representatives on media ownership, and a bill in the Senate from Sarah Hanson Young. But the PM had no appetite for an existential fight with a malignant media outfit, and made sure they all came to nothing.
With less than three months remaining before the country is due to go to an election, the hope for voters who dread the idea of an Australian Trumper occupying The Lodge is for Albanese to have in his back pocket a clever secret strategy that will be revealed at the last moment. It would need to be very secret and very clever because at present there is no sign of it. It would also need to be off-brand because after nearly three years the Labor brand has increasingly become synonymous with backsliding, timidity and excessive fear of being wedged. It’s a brand that by now means almost everyone has stopped listening.
Albanese embodies that brand and is the front man facing a bold media opponent further emboldened by the victory of his American mentor in the White House. The federal cabinet is beholden to Albanese and can’t get rid of him even if they wanted to. Were the PM to voluntarily step aside (yes, there are precedents), the question remaining is whether a last-minute replacement would leave time to articulate a persuasive narrative for the change of leadership, win the attention of voters that Albanese is not getting, and prosecute the case for a second-term Labor government.
Paul Begley has worked in public affairs roles for three decades, the most recent being 18 years as general manager of government and media relations with the Australian HR Institute.
Paul Begley
Paul Begley has worked in public affairs roles for three decades, the most recent being 18 years as general manager of government and media relations with the Australian HR Institute.