CAMERON MILNER: Albanese’s Palestine gamble is all slogan, no peace plan and risks repeating Voice failure

Anthony Albanese has always liked politics with the complexity of a T-shirt slogan.

Last term, it was Yes to the Voice. This term, it looks like it’s going to be Yes to Hamas.

The message will, of course, be delivered with lots of lefty sanctimony and derision for anyone who dares oppose him. The Prime Minister loves claiming the moral high ground even as he sinks in political wet sand.

I’m surprised he hasn’t yet mouthed the words: “It’s only a modest request for Palestinian statehood”.

I get the domestic play for Muslim votes in patches of uber safe Labor seats. It’s machine politics at its best. In the words of Graham Richardson: “whatever it takes”.

Labor branch members, especially those within ethnically stacked branches, will be lapping up that Albanese has finally stuck it to Israel.

The Voice campaign started much the same for Albanese. It was all momentum and the anguish of First Nations people living in remote communities that became the face of his request for radical constitutional change.

Make no mistake: his decision to recognise Palestinian statehood is just as radical a change to our international position as the Voice was to Australia’s domestic way of political life.

This time around, the suffering of Gazans has been weaponised by Hamas and people like Albanese.

Regrettably, starvation isn’t new to Gaza. In 2021, the UN was feeding 1.5 million Gazans daily.

The area is a failed state run by a terrorist organisation that has been at war with its people long before the atrocious attack of October 7 2023, on innocent Israelis.

Albanese’s declaration of support for Palestine is one gigantic Judas kiss to the Australian Jewish community.

Finally, the refusal to properly call out anti-Semitic chants at the Sydney Opera House and the decision to finish a game of tennis in Cottesloe while the Abbas synagogue lay smouldering make sense.

Albanese thought he had the Voice won the moment he cried at Garma. But after a few months, the slow burn of voter anger and disappointment rolled out of Queensland and into the rest of Australia.

Much like thinking the vibe would win him a referendum, it’s the detail that Albo always stumbles on.

The practical problem is that the move to recognise a Palestinian state in a few weeks won’t see the hostages released, won’t see Hamas relinquish power and won’t see Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas stop being an unelected despot accused of making his family very rich on foreign aid dollars.

The detail in the case of the Palestinian Authority is pretty compelling.

They last held what passed for elections in 2006, when Hamas won an absolute majority of 73 seats out of 123. That parliament never sat.

Abbas’ group then lost military control of Gaza a year later and has been living in exile on the West Bank ever since.

Australia has had seven general elections since that time; Palestine not one.

Abbas’ term of office was supposed to finish in 2009. But he at least returns Albanese’s phone calls, so he must be all right.

Abbas has separately been accused by human rights watch groups of gross corruption and of having diverted tens of millions in aid to personal and family connections. Yet Albo is now vouching for his good character.

Gazans have been starving and living under martial law by Hamas for almost two decades. But according to Albanese, proclaiming statehood will be the political panacea.

Members of the LBTIQ+ community are attacked and persecuted regularly, but there’ll be reform, according to Penny Wong.

TS Elliott once said, “Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow” and it’s the same for Albanese and Wong. It’s the detail that’s the inconvenient truth. Palestinians are ruled by a dysfunctional, unelected autocracy on one side and a radical Islamist theocracy on the other. And Australia has gone co-investor.

And all the while we trash the democratic, pluralist country of Israel.

Wishful thinking isn’t a strategy, but Albanese is very good at playing the confidence game.

Not one single person doesn’t wants peace in the Middle East, just like the vast majority of Australians want practical reconciliation.

The trouble is Albanese isn’t actually that good at politics, even less so complex policy.

Just as he did with the Voice when his overreach set back the cause of First Nations peoples for at least a generation, Albanese’s stumblebum approach to Palestinian statehood risks lasting damage to Australia’s international reputation and harm to the Jewish community at home.

Peace is hard, but it’s not helped by virtue signalling or wishful thinking. Just hoping anti-Semitism will disappear in Australia or that Hamas will disarm and dissolve is naivety on steroids.

Politics takes concentration. Complex policy takes intellect and it sure as hell can’t be reduced to a slogan on a T-shirt.

Albo’s Voice campaign failed on the details just as he was thinking that simply declaring Palestinian statehood now will come close to delivering Gazans from their daily suffering.