Although Australian elections are not marked by turnout issues as they are in the US where voting is discretionary, there are lessons for Anthony Albanese in Donald Trump’s election victory.
It appears that a significant proportion of Kamala Harris’s usual supporter base did not bother to queue up on a cold Tuesday last November to vote for a candidate who had not separated herself from Biden’s complicity in the slaughter of Palestinian civilians by Netanyahu’s Government in Israel using American bombs.
Despite Trump’s insistence that he won the election by a landslide, he actually won the popular vote by a slim margin of 1.7 percent, compared to Obama’s 7.3 percent in 2008, Clinton’s 8.5 percent in 1996, or Reagan’s 18.2 percent in 1984. Trump makes the point that he also won the crucial swing states to win the electoral college which is true, but he put enormous resources into winning them and won them narrowly. Trump’s readiness to tell barefaced uncontested lies with impunity should be counted as a resource for the purpose of persuading gullible citizens and some justices on the Supreme Court of his fitness for high office.
With 81 million votes in 2020, a lacklustre Joe Biden was seven million clear of Trump’s 74 million in a record turnout of eligible voters. Trump won an extra three million votes in 2024 to give him 77 million against Kamala Harris’s 75 million, six million fewer than Biden had won in 2020. Given that Harris was a much better campaign performer than Biden had been in 2020, that loss of six million Democrat voters from 2020, was both puzzling and predictable.
Before during and after the 2024 election, questions had been asked by pollsters about the apparent loss of voter support from sections of the electorate that had reliably voted Democrat. Central among those was the loss of Arab American votes over US support for Netanyahu.
On 29 October 2024, just a week before the election, PBS News reported on the struggles of Harris’s emissaries in Detroit, who were seeing the stark reality of the dilemma facing the country’s largest concentrations of Arab Americans and their supporters among Democrat voters:
“Either they punish Harris for what they view as complicity in the deaths of at least 43,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, or they endure Donald Trump ‘s return to the White House, which they fear would revive discrimination toward their community.”
Nabih H. Ayad, chairman of the Arab American Civil Rights League, stated the situation succinctly and was looking for a response:
“I love this country, but I’ll tell you, we have never been so disappointed in this country as we are now. We wanted to give the Democratic Party the opportunity to do something, and they haven’t.”
“The one line we can’t cross,” Ayad said, “is genocide.”
PBS reported that Nasrina Bargzie and Brenda Abdelal, who were hired by Harris’ campaign to spearhead Arab and Muslim outreach, “listened intently but said little in response”. Detroit is the most populous city in the northern rust belt state of Michigan. Harris lost Michigan, along with the other rust belt states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Writing about an election poll of US voters on 20 January 2025, Umar A Farooq in Middle East Eye reported that “29 percent of Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 and didn’t vote for Harris in 2024 cited ‘not ending Israel’s violence in Gaza’ as their reason for withholding their vote”.
They didn’t vote for Trump. They just didn’t vote at all, and that loss of Democrat turnout accounted for a significant proportion of the six million Democrats who voted for Biden in 2020 but did not vote for Harris in 2024.
In Australia, Anthony Albanese’s Labor cabinet may not have realised that there is widespread citizen opposition to the unrestrained violence being unleashed on Palestinian citizens by the Netanyahu regime in Israel. It might be said that it would be impossible not to have noticed that opposition because it has been persistent and has expressed itself in weekly pro-Palestine gatherings in Melbourne, the city in which I live, since October of 2023. The same pro-Palestine sentiment has been widespread in other cities in Australia and around the world, in addition to its presence on social media.
But the Canberra bubble is a real thing. Parties in power enjoy the comfort of being in power which can result in feeling bullet-proof to some extent. They might look at poll results from time to time and feel some passing anxiety but console themselves with the cliched thought that there is only one poll that counts.
Scott Morrison’s Liberal Party appeared to operate on that basis in the latter part of 2021 and 2022, when their ministerial incompetence and corruption were becoming better understood, and their leader’s phoniness was becoming more widely despised as he appeared in various photo-op guises as a Sri Lankan curry chef, a welder operating his gun, a women’s hairdressing assistant, and an aircraft pilot, in order to suggest to the voter than he was all things to all men (and women).
In some ways the Albanese government is exhibiting similar traits of denial. High up among them is the denial that Australians who would be inclined to vote Labor in the 2025 election due in four months are seeing that option slipping away. Top of their mind are the often gruesome daily reports on social and independent media that ethnic cleansing in Gaza is persistent and that Israel openly intends the recent ceasefire to be temporary. In addition, Israel’s bombing of civilian targets in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan have become more flagrant.
Led by Murdoch’s NewsCorp, Australia’s legacy media assist in keeping the political class in their bubble by reporting stories that bolster the Israeli perspective while largely ignoring the mass slaughter of defenceless Palestinian citizens.
Throughout the escalation of the decades-long conflict since October 2023 the Albanese Government has prioritised the sensitivities of Jewish Australians who vehemently support Netanyahu’s war crimes, as set out by the International Criminal Court. At the same time, it has largely neglected the plight of Palestinians. As a signatory to the Convention on Genocide, Israel was forced to acknowledge the case brought against it in the International Court of Justice by South Africa. Although Israel refused to recognise the jurisdiction of the court, and while Australia is an ICC member, the Albanese government’s response to the court’s findings and actions, including its declaration of Netanyahu as a war criminal and calls for his arrest, has been lacklustre at best. Similarly, Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong has often called, in vain, on Israel to exercise restraint, has repeated Australia’s position on a two-state solution, and has chimed in with the US from time to time in muted calls for a ceasefire.
Israel’s response to Australia’s less than full-throated support for its unrestrained bombing of civilian targets in Gaza has earned Australia an accusation from Netanyahu of being “extremely anti-Israel” and alluded to Albanese’s partial responsibility for an arson attack of a synagogue in Ripponlea. Graffiti attacks and other incidents such as cars set alight are being characterised by the legacy media and politicians as antisemitic, and claims by some Jewish leaders that Jewish people feel unsafe are given widespread coverage and credibility in the media.
Local police have not detected suspects or laid charges against any parties for the Melbourne fire or other incidents, yet Australian Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw has come out suggesting that unspecified foreign actors might be guilty of causing the incidents, not one of which has caused loss of life or injury to a person.
Before sending Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to Tel Aviv in January in order to mend strained relations with Israel, Albanese had appointed with much ado Jillian Segal as a special envoy to combat antisemitism in July 2024. By contrast, many months later at a quiet community event in October to which the media were not invited, Albanese announced the appointment of an Islamophobia envoy, Aftab Malik.
“The grandeur surrounding the government’s antisemitism envoy announcement — which came complete with a prime ministerial press conference — starkly contrasts with the mere issuing of a press release for the Islamophobia envoy,” Australia Palestine Advocacy Network president Nasser Mashni told Crikey News.
Despite just one police arrest against a Sydney man for making threats, following a fire at a childcare centre and graffiti on a supermarket wall in Sydney, Peter Dutton and NewsCorp media decided that antisemitism was off the scale, and Jillian Segal joined the chorus demanding that Albanese call a crisis national cabinet meeting to discuss the issue.
The ABC’s Brett Worthington reported on 22 January that Peter Dutton “alleged Australia was home to ‘rolling terrorist attacks’ and that Albanese had been ‘dragged kicking and screaming to hold a meeting’. On Wednesday he foreshadowed ‘this is going to escalate to a point where somebody is going to lose their life’.”
It is escalating because every moment that Dutton takes a break from insisting there can be only one legitimate Australian flag, he returns to stoking the idea of Arab-Jewish hatred in Australia whether it exists or not, all in the name of ‘social cohesion’.
The more he stokes the idea of antisemitism being out of control and Albanese’s pussyfooting diplomacy on the disaster unfolding in Gaza, the more he reminds his voter base that he alone possesses ‘moral clarity’ on what he depicts as a good-versus-evil existential contest between Israel and Palestine. Moral clarity as Dutton sees it means support for the eradication of the Palestinian people and putting an end to the idea of a state of Palestine, thus getting the idea of a two-state solution off the table even though it has been Australia’s official diplomatic position for decades.
In calling the national cabinet meeting, Albanese was once again dancing to a leadership tune arranged by Dutton, and once he had done it he was open to attacks that the meeting was a failure because it didn’t go hard enough in pushing for draconian punishments of people accused of antisemitic speech or action, with any questioning of Netanyahu’s military or political behaviour labelled as antisemitic.
In his desperation to avoid being wedged by the Greens when Fatima Payman threatened to cross the floor if Albanese wouldn’t implement the Labor conference policy on recognising the state of Palestine, the PM must wonder how he has now been wedged into a hopeless corner that makes his opponent look strong and him look weak.
A pre-condition to a two-state solution is the recognition of the state of Palestine, and it could so easily have put Labor on a consistent principled footing had he not put on such a show of high dudgeon in June 2024 by affectively expelling Senator Payman from the party and dispatching her to the crossbench.
Whether you see Payman as naïve or scheming, the fact is she provided Albanese with an opportunity to exercise some courage by taking an independent principled stand, albeit one at variance with the positions taken by Dutton, NewsCorp and Biden’s US administration, the same administration whose Israeli allegiance cost crucial Democrat votes that would otherwise have gone to Harris.
Like Harris, Albanese’s adherence to the Biden position on Israel has alienated a significant proportion of Muslim and pro-Palestine voters who would otherwise vote Labor. Albanese would never win the votes of rusted-on Liberal voters who would probably not be much interested in the Gaza conflict, but who admire strong leadership and get it from Dutton, along with helpful serves of ‘moral clarity’.
Albanese would usually expect voters from the left and centre to vote Labor, many of whom see his party as one that traditionally operates according to social, economic and political principles that are not merely self-serving but benefit society as a whole, including less advantaged sections of society whose voices tend to go unheard by those in power. Some of those voters describe themselves as socialist and others simply say they want to support a political party that espouses a ‘light on the hill’, one that illuminates issues as far away as Gaza and takes a principled stand on them.
Albanese’s Labor Party was offered a chance to show that the light still beams on the hill. It was offered its Fatima Payman moment on Gaza but let it pass in favour of operating in the AUKUS space where the Australian Strategic Policy Institute makes calls for Australia in America’s interest. Dutton operates happily in that space and reminded Australian voters this week that he and Scott Morrison, not Albanese’s Labor Party, deserve all the credits for our visionary involvement in AUKUS.
It was a reminder, if he needed it, that the light on the hill has all but been snuffed out, and the beneficiaries are the Greens, the Teal independents and Dutton’s Liberal Party.
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.