As pointed out by Crikey today, the Australian Labor Party "is run by a right-wing core that hates its own pallid left and the Greens far more than it hates anyone in the Coalition. It’s a cross-party grouping headed by [Deputy PM and Defence Minister and pro-AUKUS] Richard Marles at the moment, whose job is to enforce the US alliance and the national security state within Labor. It has links into the permanent defence establishment and the arms industry — via ASPI — to the Coalition, via the ridiculous 'Wolverines' group, the late Kimberley Kitching’s homeland, and to pro-Zionist advocates."
To explain, the "Wolverines" group is a bipartisan group ("China hawks") established to speak up against China's growing assertiveness. Formed in 2017, the group includes ultra-right wing former IPA Liberal James Patterson (who under Scott Morrison's prime ministership chaired the powerful Parliamentary Joint Committee of Intelligence and Security). The name Wolverines is a reference to the 1984 movie Red Dawn, starring Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen as high school football stars who thwart a Soviet invasion of the United States. These MPs see China-bashing as politically advantageous, whether to win votes at a general election or to shore up their preselection.
The group was founded by the late Kimberley Kitching. Prior to her death in 2022 Kitching was deputy chair of Parliamentary Friends of Israel. In June 2020 she was announced as a founding member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China. In February 2022, she and chair Eric Abetz issued a joint statement rejecting an Amnesty International report's "attempts to equate Israel’s efforts to the abhorrent historical practice of apartheid in South Africa". In same month, one month before her death, Kitching used parliamentary privilege to suggest to the head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation that Chau Chak Wing was the wealthy businessman behind an alleged Chinese plot to interfere in Australian elections to install politicians sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party.
Victorian senator Raff Ciccone was inducted into the Wolverines in 2020. He's from the conservative "Shoppies": the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees' Association (SDA) - also known as Labor Unity in Victoria, largely union-based like many of Labor's Right-Wing. As well as being Deputy Government Whip in the Senate, Ciccone is Chair of Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Legislation Committee, Deputy Chair of Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee and Deputy Chair of Standing Committee for the Scrutiny of Bills. That puts him in a very powerful position when it comes to Government defence spending.
Since the Federal election defeat in 2019 the "conscience" of the Labor Party - Labor Left - has dwindled with the very dominant Labor Right espousing that anything Israel does is not a war crime, because Israel does it.
When Australians elected a Federal Labor government in May 2022 - with pro-Palestinian Greens preferences - many voters thought that after the far-right wing pro-Trump LNP years they were electing a government of compassion and social justice. However as summarized in this paper, under the new Australian Labor Government Australia continues to shockingly betray Palestinian human rights, and human rights in general, in 85 ways.
The Labor Right wing dominance extends to State politics too. NSW's premier Chris Minns is archetypical of the Right: without thinking about how it might affect the many Palestinian/Arab/Muslims in Sydney (many of which are from Labor heartland South Western Sydney electorates) he ordered the Sydney Opera House to be emblazoned with the Israeli flag colours on 9 October 2023. Knowing it was deliberately inflammatory, NSW Police and [Community Security Group NSW] urged the community not to attend the Sydney Opera House precinct or Town Hall. "Community members already in the CBD should also be vigilant ... The events tonight may pose a risk to the safety of community members are you are strongly urged not to attend". Later police threatened pro-Palestinian protestors with arrest and full force of the law.
But Premier Chris Minns said the act would not be repeated, despite a federal Labor colleague criticising the lack of public solidarity shown for Palestinian victims of Israeli retaliatory strikes. Community groups also called on the premier to convey compassion for the more than 3000 Palestinian civilians who have been reported killed since October 7, including hundreds in a single attack at a hospital in Gaza. Mr Minns said he was concerned about the loss of innocent Palestinian lives but pointed towards a difference in context and circumstance compared to when the Israeli colours were beamed on the Opera House. “We won’t be lighting it up further in relation to this conflict,” he said yesterday (19 October 2023).
In fact Australian governments, led by the Labor Party, are overseeing the most significant crackdown on the right to protest in the country since World War II. With the support of the entire political establishment, and a media that is cheering on the evisceration of civil liberties, they are moving to outlaw all demonstrations opposing Israel’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza and defending the Palestinian people.
The move has been carried out on an explicitly political basis. NSW Police moved against any pro-Palestinian demonstration after state Labor Premier Chris Minns declared that supporters of Palestine would not “commandeer our streets.” Labor’s police minister had stated: “I don’t want to see protests on our street at all, from anybody. I don’t think anybody really does.” Acting NSW Police Commissioner David Hudson said that “extraordinary powers” may be deployed.
The statements underscore that this is not a one-off. As Israel continues to bomb densely-populated civilian neighborhoods and its fascistic Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks the language of genocide, public displays of opposition will be forbidden.
When did Labor lose its compassion?
Does Labor represent the people "for the peace, order and good government " of the nation as stated in the Constitution, or does it serve the interests behind the arms industry?
Some of the Labor language currently being used appears to merely echo US's pro-Israeli sentiments in the Gaza conflict: the prime minister’s recent statement that Hamas’ deadly and bloody assault against civilians wasn’t merely an attack on Israel but “an attack on Jewish people”. Consider, too, Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong’s suggestion last week that these war crimes were “an assault on Israel, on the Jewish people”. Or, more explicitly still, Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil’s lament that “to see people attacked for their religion is a horrible and terrifying thing” — a view shared by several other members of Parliament.
Or the extreme right wing Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles’ recent statement that Israel is, to his mind, “acting within the rules of war”. This, he would have us believe, holds despite Israel’s use of chemical weapons on civilians; despite the relentless symphony of bombs it has rained down on Gaza since Hamas’ attack; despite the “complete siege” of a population of 2.3 million, with electricity, water and food supplies cut off in gross violation of international law; despite the targeted pogroms of Palestinians by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank; despite the obvious illegality attached to Israel’s 24-hour evacuation order; and despite the deliberate bombing of a road that Israel had declared “safe” for evacuation.
As international law barrister and special rapporteur to the United Nations Professor Ben Saul has written, if Marles truly believes these tactics fall within the “rules of war”, then he is “poorly briefed”.
Similar concerns apply to all those politicians who have so readily amplified Israel’s right to self-defence and so quickly forsworn the sanctity of the right to protest in their condemnation of pro-Palestinian marches. What’s left is a slippery authoritarian-inflected populism that whistles the dirge of our broken ideals and tugs at our fraying humanity.
Language that is not far away from the extreme right-wing words of Liberal MP Julian Leeser who stated that the murderous attack reminded “Jews across the world that in each generation we face those who seek to exterminate Jewish people from the face of the earth”. Language that is blind to Israel’s decades-long illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, the 16-year-blockade of Gaza, ongoing settler terrorism and various other violations of international law resulting in action that was, its heart, about pushing back against Israeli impunity — but conversely the all-consuming spectre of Hamas as unprovoked “Islamist terrorists” . Language that is intended to mould or reshape common understanding of the conflict in a way that serves the nation’s manifestly biased relationship with Israel aligning with our military weapons supplying ally the US.
The obvious problem with such a stance, that also so readily conflates Israel with worldwide Judaism (and, incorrectly, Judaism with Zionism), is that it all too easily provokes a situation where any criticism of Israel, however justified or benign, is automatically deflected as an attack on Jewish people and therefore dismissed as anti-Semitic It’s in this way that the word anti-Semitism, much like the phrase Hamas terrorist or terrorist sympathiser, comes to us ready-made. To draw on George Orwell, the word “constructs reality for you”, even daring to “think your thoughts for you to a certain extent”.
So that language results in supposedly defensible invitations to “flatten Gaza” and kill these “savages”, these “human animals” and anyone who remains. Here, Israel’s human rights atrocities are framed as a reaction to such “evil”, fortifying both its conduct and its people’s humanity in terms that are predictable and beyond reproach.
The point is words matter — they have the power to grant humanity and to snatch it away. And at this moment, they’re being wielded by our government (and the opposition) in a manner that favours Israel and dehumanises Palestinians. Even the description “Israel-Hamas war” is grossly misleading in so far as it implies Israel is merely targeting Hamas, not civilians.
In truth, there’s little that’s unfolding in Gaza today that can rightly be described as an unfortunate corollary to Israel’s right of self-defence. Indeed, it’s nothing less than the targeted and collective punishment of Palestinian civilians — a “mass ethnic cleansing” warns a United Nations human rights expert, with all the unsparing human tragedy that implies.
And anyone who denies these truths is either deceived or doing the deceiving.
The motivation? Well, it's not too far a logical leap to connect the dots to military alliance with the US (and its inextricable ties to Israel) and its ubiquitous arms industry.
At least there are Greens (and a handful of Labor Left) who are not so blind.
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