One important irony of the federal election result is that while some finally realised that electing Peter Dutton was an invitation to open Australia as a branch office to implement Donald Trump’s authoritarian domestic political agenda, the re-elected Anthony Albanese government will continue to materially support Trump’s foreign policies and wars, including the genocide of Palestinians, however much they violate international law.
It is also ironic that the difference between Labor and the Coalition on all the major issues, including climate change and its impacts, socio-economic inequality, teetering public infrastructure and the horrendous defence-foreign policy sell-out to the US war machine, was tissue-thin.
It was only Dutton’s import of Trumpism into the Coalition’s domestic political agenda which sent them into oblivion.
All these issues, except the spectre of Trumpism as an internal wrecking ball, were duplicitous exclusions from the election campaign, by Labor-Coalition agreement.
“Duplicitous exclusion” was used by political philosopher Mark Warren to demonstrate how political corruption exists in 21st century “western democracies” by denying knowledge to voters to make an informed vote.
The most reprehensible of these exclusions was Australia’s bipartisan agreement to censor the issue of genocide from public view, an agreement endorsed by most mainstream media and pollsters.
However, this censorship, obviously publicly unknown in its scope, has been unsuccessful in hiding, in general outline, a broad range of ways and means that Australia has supported Israel without interruption since October 2023. This is in contravention of international law and is a complete rejection of International Court of Justice rulings and conclusions by Amnesty International, United Nations International Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the Human Rights Commission.
The public is therefore unaware of Australian financial, military (weapons, parts, vehicles, technology, intelligence, personnel), trade in goods (coal, for example), propaganda, diplomatic and legislative support for the destruction of Palestine.
The exclusion of genocide represents much more than the now normalised small target campaigns, which have already set in motion the gradual disintegration and corruption of political representation.
It is a breaking point where adherence to international humanitarian law, in the most serious of all human rights issues, has been abandoned by the Labor-Coalition political machines.
It is a breaking point in restricting and limiting public participation in the political arena to parameters defined by lawsuits filed to intimidate, silence and harass critics or opponents, by media vilification and by McCarthyist-style political demonisation. These are all calculated to destroy the lives and careers of those who play leadership roles in opposing genocide.
The self-serving politics and instincts of both Labor and the Coalition — both glued in service to US imperial interests — requires a dumbing down of public knowledge of the world at large and a replacing of informed analysis with censorship and secrecy. It is about promoting ignorance.
Thus, it has become imperative for Australia’s ruling class to hide its support for genocide by all means possible. It involves convoluted opaque arrangements and agreements in the transfer of military equipment and other goods to Israel, as we see with the sale of Australian anti-personnel weaponry to Israel this year; weaponry ideally suited to the mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza — especially children.
It has become even more imperative that voices opposing genocide be silenced, condemned as “antisemitic”, or supporters of terrorism or labelled in true 1950s McCarthyist terms as an “extremist populist left” which has “shamefully weaponised the Gaza conflict”. Labor MP Julian Hill used those words to attack the Greens’ principled opposition to genocide.
Labor foreign minister Penny Wong, who falsely accused the Greens of “spreading false information on Gaza”, needs to explain why she does not outright condemn Israel’s latest plan to destroy “more and more homes” in Gaza and to only provide food to Palestinians who agree not to return to the areas where they lived. This will ensure that the “inevitable outcome” of the Israeli army’s destruction of Gaza will be either starvation to death or the forced expulsion of surviving Palestinians from the territory.
Israel’s “plan” is a war crime, as Australia’s government would know full well, not “false information”.
Nor is it “false information” that, in the last few days, Israeli minister Itamar Ben Gvir said Israel “needed to be more determined to open the gates of hell” in Gaza and that minister Bezalel Smotrich stated that “Gaza will be totally destroyed”, the population concentrated in a narrow strip bordering Egypt in the south and “be totally despairing”.
Will Australia do nothing to oppose Israel’s latest plan, “Operation Gideon’s Chariot”, to finally exterminate or remove all Palestinians in Gaza, just as it refused to do anything at all to halt the worst and most horrific abuses of the rights of children ever witnessed in real time?
We need to make our views loudly known, since it did nothing in response to a March report of the UN Human Rights Commission that “Israel has increasingly employed sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians as part of a broader effort to undermine their right to self-determination and carried out genocidal acts through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare facilities”.
The “false information on Gaza” and the real, materially-based “shamefully weaponised” Australian stance sits firmly and irrevocably with the Labor-Coalition political machine. It makes a mockery of any claims they make to upholding basic human rights defined in international law.
[Peter Henning has authored three books on Tasmanians during World War II, the last being Veils and Tin Hats about Tasmanian nurses at war.]