Australia has devolved into a US client state — and it seems the Albanese government has little interest in reversing this trend.
So, there it is: a nod to the mental bandwidth of what passes for the right’s understanding of the geopolitical realities of the current moment.
Labor’s modest shift in position on the enduring Israel-Palestine conflict this week has, according to a sulphurous Peter Dutton, fractured the nation’s emphatically pro-Israel stance. Worse still, the opposition leader insists, the changes weren’t inspired by principle but a thinly veiled concession to the left flank of the party ahead of its national conference. The inevitable upshot, despaired The Australian’s Greg Sheridan, is the adoption of a partisan position that is “wrong on the international law, wrong on the morality of the situation and probably wrong on the politics”.
Seizing on this, former shadow attorney-general Julian Leeser spoke of a deeper and darker crisis, one where the decision to return Australia to its pre-2014 diplomatic stance of referring to the West Bank and Gaza as “occupied Palestinian territories” (as opposed to “disputed territories”) was neither unusual nor without risk. On the contrary, he said it was something destined to “embolden” or give way to Palestinian “jihad”; a cunning plan, it would seem, to turn us into a rogue state of de-facto terrorist sympathisers.
Read the article by Maieve McGregor in Crikey.