“Just turn the heat down; dial down the rhetoric”, Labor PM Anthony Albanese keeps saying.
This mantra, dutifully parroted by other ministers in his cabinet, is grossly hypocritical because he and his government are simultaneously fanning the flames of racism and division.
Labor’s handling of the so-called “ISIS brides” issue is just the latest example.
For years, the Kurdish-led Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria/Rojava has been appealing to Australia, and other countries, to take their own citizens among the Islamic State terrorists, and their families, off their hands.
From a legal, human rights and justice perspective, that was the right thing to do.
The world’s richest countries were far better resourced to repatriate their citizens who had gone to the brutal “caliphate” that ISIS ran in the region than the Rojava freedom fighters who sacrificed many thousands of lives to defeat ISIS.
The Rojava administration appealed to the rich countries to set up mechanisms to hold the ISIS terrorists to account and ensure that justice was done. But it was ignored and Rojava was denied recognition, and left to deal with the mess with little international support.
Compounding this crime, the United States and its allies (including Australia) have put Rojava into a new state of siege by throwing their support behind the Syrian Transitional Government, led by former Al-Qaeda commander Ahmed al-Sharaa, which is now closing down the camps holding ISIS terrorists and their families.
A small group of wives and children of ISIS leaders were trying to return to Australia after having passports issued but were blocked by the Albanese. “You made your bed, you lie in it,” he callously told the media. But 23 of this group of 34 Australian citizens that the Albanese government were children!
The PM’s choice of this misplaced dismissal was a dog whistle to the racist resurgence that Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party is now riding in the polls.
However, Labor’s culpability for the racist resurgence runs far deeper.
Hanson and other racist politicians are riding a perfect storm created by growing economic insecurity, fear and the conscious fanning of racism by wealthy and powerful forces.
Serial Labor and Coalition governments are implementing the corporate profits-first policies of neoliberalism which made a wealthy minority even richer while forcing the rest into greater economic insecurity.
In fact Labor governments, under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, kick started the neoliberal “reforms” by undermining the once-powerful trade union movement from within.
Both Labor and Coalition governments have gone along for years with the United States-led war drive, that has drained public funds away from addressing urgent social and environmental needs while more deeply implicating Australia in brutal genocidal wars, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Palestine.
This complicity has also fuelled the racist resurgent, as we have seen in the bipartisan campaigns to equate criticism of Israel’s Gaza genocide with antisemitism.
This toxic combination is driving the resurgence of racist and far-right parties and politicians around the world.
Labor’s historic culpability for the rise of the racist far right is undeniable. But the choice of Labor leaders to keep blowing on the dog whistle and further fan the flames of racism and division could prove politically suicidal. Two recent polls show One Nation not only decimating the Coalition’s base of support, but also starting to eat into Labor's vote.
As Melbourne University-based psephologist Adrian Beaumont explained in a February 24 article in The Conversation, a national DemosAU poll, conducted February 16–20, gave Labor 29% of the primary vote, Pauline Hanson One Nation (PHON) 28%, Coalition 21%, Greens 12% and all others 10%. A national Fox & Hedgehog poll, conducted February 17–19, gave Labor 30% of the primary vote, OPHON 25%, Coalition 24%, Greens 12% (down two) and all others 9%.
How these polls translate into actual election results will soon be tested at the March 21 South Australian election.
But the most serious price for Labor’s capitulation to racism will not be this or that election result. Racism divides the working class, the biggest and potentially most powerful section of the population, and in doing so undermines the power of solidarity, wherein lies the only hope for a way out of this nightmare.
[Peter Boyle is a member of the Socialist Alliance national executive.]