Former NSW premier Morris Iemma says Labor in danger of losing seats to Muslim issues candidates

Former NSW Labor premier Morris Iemma says his party is in danger of losing seats to Muslim independent candidates as voters turn away from Australia’s major political parties and focus on polarising single issues like Israel.

Violent protests a week ago against Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Australia highlighted a major faultline among a subgroup of voters in a climate of heightened anti-Semitism, with demonstrators chanting “globalise the intifada”.

As a pro-Israel Labor leader and MP during the 2000s, Mr Iemma was able to increase his vote in his old seat of Lakemba in South Western Sydney, which has Australia’s highest concentration of Muslim voters.

This was despite a threat from a controversial sheikh at the local mosque to run against him in protest at his support for the world’s only Jewish state.

But after the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel, Lakemba was the scene of street celebrations, which Mr Iemma said had “appalled and sickened” him. Anti-Semitic attacks have since escalated in Australia.

The fracturing of support for Australia’s two major parties could see Muslim issues candidates elected to Parliament in Australia, like in the UK, where Muslim and left-wing independents were elected in 2024 on a platform of opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“It’s not impossible, no,” Mr Iemma told The Nightly. “You couldn’t rule it out.

“The dominance of the two established political parties is breaking down. A lot of these changes are going to be permanent ones.”

The murder of 15 people at Bondi Beach on December 14, and protests against Israel that followed also suggested Australia was now a lot more polarised.

“It’s much more heightened, it’s a lot more aggressive. There’s violence: that’s not something that was around when I was the local MP,” he said.

“There is an aggressiveness and certainly there’s a violence to the verbal chanting that didn’t exist 20 years ago.”

During last year’s election, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke suffered a 6.1 per cent primary vote swing against him as independent challenger Ziad Basyouny, a Muslim doctor, ran in his Federal seat of Watson, which takes in Lakemba.

Mr Iemma, who is now a registered lobbyist, said Mr Burke was able to hold his seat, with a swing to him after preferences, based on his high profile. The Federal minister, from Labor’s Right faction, had also been a fierce critic of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military campaign against Hamas.

“Tony Burke is not a weak, local MP. He’s a very strong local personality,” he said.

The Federal Government last year recognised a Palestinian state, a policy which Mr Iemma declined to endorse. It’s a policy Mr Burke had seconded in 2018 at Labor’s national conference.

“I don’t want to get drawn on that. I’m old history. I don’t want to enter into a public debate about what the Government’s position is,” Mr Iemma said.

At the 2007 election, Mr Iemma increased his margin in Lakemba despite being a vocally pro-Israel premier who stared down a threat from Sheikh Taj El-Din Hilaly to run against him, less than a year after he likened women who didn’t wear the hijab to “uncovered meat”.

“I had an instance in 2007 where Sheikh Hilaly, the leader of the Lakemba Mosque, the leader of the Muslim community, ventured into the public domain and said the Muslim community should run candidates against me and my colleagues,” he said.

“And I went very public in denouncing him and challenging him and it had no negative impact on me at all in the Muslim community or the broader community.

“Tellingly in the Lakemba booths, so these are the booths where the community was concentrated in and the booths closest to the mosque, my vote hit 90 per cent.

“It had no impact because whatever people’s individual views, at that time, people understood that Israel had a right to exist; the Jewish community had a right to live in peace and harmony.”

But Mr Iemma said it would be a lot harder now for a Labor MP to withstand a challenge from a Muslim independent.

“It’s different now,” he said. “You’ve followed what has happened since October the 7th.”

The former premier also had a dig at his Labor predecessor Bob Carr, a founder of Labor Friends of Israel who last year described the Jewish Israeli lobby as a “foreign influence operation”.

“I’ve not changed my position. He’s got a view and a position and I’ve got a different one,” Mr Iemma said.

“Israel has a right to exist and a right to defend itself. That was my position 20 years ago when I was a premier and that’s still my position.”

Mr Iemma said running candidates with a religious agenda was hardly the best way to effect change, as Sheikh Hilaly’s threat 19 years ago demonstrated.

“The community itself reminded him that placing candidates into the field for a religious purpose is not the best way to have a good relationship with government or opposition.”