EDITORIAL: How Albanese failed for two years to see the emergency brewing
The capitulation of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as he finally agreed to call a royal commission in the wake of the worst terrorist attack on home soil says much about him.
Deep down, Mr Albanese is still the Labor warrior who once declared “I like fighting Tories”. But being a political warrior with fond memories of campus politics was never going to be enough.
His immediate response to Bondi was to revert to type. He didn’t want to give “the Tories” an inch. Just imagine what a royal commission with real powers could come up with? What it might unearth?
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.How it might show the awful events of that day did not come out of the blue.
That they followed more than two years of creeping anti-Semitism, which became ever more emboldened even as Hamas cruelly held underground the innocents kidnapped during the murderous rampage of October 7, 2023.
Witness the Opera House celebration of the attack. The joy of Islamist extremists. The campus intimidation of Jews; the hate-filled marches to chants of “From the River to The Sea” — a call for the eradication of Israel — and “globalise the Intifada”, an overt encouragement of violence against Jews.
This created an environment in which, even this week, a major media organisation found it acceptable to publish a cartoon that reheated centuries of anti-Semitic tropes.
The cartoon, in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers, portrayed demands for a royal commission into the massacre as being orchestrated by political and media forces — driven by Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is drawn banging a drum.
The silence from the board of the papers’ owner Nine Entertainment about the wantonly ugly cartoon — which ignored the national demand for a royal commission into a shocking attack at our most famous beach — showed how the once great mastheads have become a vehicle for absurd reactionary radical Left politics.
The same environment brought a chorus of outrage this week — less than a month after Bondi and with families’ grief still raw — about a decision to dump pro-Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah from the line-up at the Adelaide Festival’s Writers Week.
This is the Dr Abdel-Fattah who, after the October 7 attack, reportedly changed her Facebook profile photo to a paratrooper in the colours of the Palestinian flag.
Who reportedly posted on X on Boxing Day, 2024: “May 2025 be the end of Israel”. Who declared, “if you are a Zionist you have no claim or right to cultural safety”.
Concrete examples of how Mr Albanese had failed for two years to recognise the emergency brewing even before Israel’s military response to the existential threat presented by the Hamas invasion.
Failed to stand up to the radical wing of his own party and the extreme Greens who had dragged the social climate into the gutter. Failed to recognise this was not campus politics but life and death.
Coffins of 15 innocent souls are testament to that.
