Anthony Albanese may be facing a winter of discontent, but his counterpart in Britain has emerged into a warm summer dawn.
Sir Keir Starmer’s “emphatic win”, as Albanese described it in a congratulatory phone call to the new British prime minister soon after he was appointed by the King, carries with it a disturbing portent for the Australian government.
Starmer’s thumping majority masks the emergence of a new electoral phenomenon, which if it takes hold in His Majesty’s southern realm could see the Albanese government fall or at best be pushed into minority.
In a post-election analysis, Britain’s The Telegraph described the political campaign The Muslim Vote as “an insurgent force” inspired by “deeply sectarian interests” that had a single set of demands all related to Gaza. The candidates that it tactically supported ended up winning four seats, which grew to five when you included expelled former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. It was a result to rival that other insurgency led by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
Albanese, unlike Starmer, faces the next election as an incumbent defending the slimmest of majorities. He has no fat to burn. The prime minister can take little consolation from the fact that the UK is another country: the similarities of our political cultures are too significant to dismiss.
Albanese certainly realises this, revealing that he has been in regular contact with Starmer ever since he became Labour leader, comparing notes and sharing insights. According to a briefing note, they discussed the Middle East conflict and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza during their Saturday afternoon phone call. Albanese proudly proclaims that their two organisations are “sister parties”.
The anger that swept the Tories from office was fuelled by the reality that on their watch the nation was plunged into recession, services declined exponentially, cost-of-living pressures built and the government was a circus of five prime ministers.
The two-year-old Albanese government doesn’t carry all that baggage, but it is accountable to an electorate suffering similar financial challenges, much of which cannot be dealt with by quick or easy solutions.
The single-issue “Gaza vote” sees all of this as secondary, something the Australian version of The Muslim Vote makes clear on its website. It is tapping into a deep resentment and alienation exacerbated by the belief that the Australian government, like the British Labour Party and the Conservatives before it, does not heed.
This group sees the response of the British and Australian governments to the Gaza devastation and death toll as being disdainful of Palestinians and of diaspora Muslim communities.
According to The Telegraph’s dissection of the poll across Britain, comfortable Labour majorities swung to razor-thin margins or outright losses as Muslim voters turned their backs on the party. The bigger the percentage of Muslim voters in the 77 constituencies targeted by The Muslim Vote, the bigger the swing.
Australian voting analyst William Bowe says “it can be inferred that a Muslim backlash similar to that suffered by Labour in Britain would particularly hit two of Albanese’s cabinet ministers, Jason Clare and Tony Burke, in their Western Sydney seats”. Bowe says it would reduce their primary vote shares from “a little above 50 per cent to the mid to high 30s”.
Their fate then would certainly depend on preferences, unlike in Britain, and that could place them in the hands of the Liberals. Would Peter Dutton’s contempt for the Greens stop the Liberals from thwarting a Labor majority, robbing the government of two of its more impressive performers?
Coincidentally, but no less pertinent, while the Brits were voting, Senator Fatima Payman was announcing her resignation from the Labor Party with “a heavy heart” for her suspension over support of a Greens Senate motion recognising Palestinian statehood.
The young Muslim senator immediately became a lightning rod for the anger bubbling away in electorates. RedBridge Group pollster Kos Samaras says his research finds they are “on fire”.
The Payman episode captured Labor’s dilemma. In defending century-old party rules consolidating solidarity on the floor of the parliament, the prime minister and his colleagues were sending a message that the claims of Palestine to statehood and the suffering of Palestinian civilians in the war was secondary to party rules. The rigidity was made all the more problematic by the fact Labor’s party platform says it would “as a matter of priority” recognise a Palestinian state.
There is a wide view in the caucus – and the party more broadly – that the prime minister and Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong should have been much stronger in their language on the contentious way Israel is carrying out the war in Gaza. One senior Labor figure puts it down to their propensity to be overly cautious.
On Tuesday, at the Sydney Jewish Museum, with its heart-rending displays documenting the Holocaust, Albanese announced a special envoy to combat anti-Semitism, Jillian Segal. She immediately stirred controversy. Last November, Segal told a vigil there should be no ceasefire without all the hostages being released, at odds with government policy then and now.
You would think a government still reeling from the Payman episode, with motions of support for the senator and her position being passed in Labor branches, including in Albanese’s own electorate, would pay more attention to political management.
Palestinian advocates weren’t alone in wondering why there was no special envoy to combat Islamophobia. The prime minister says he will be announcing such an envoy “shortly”. Behind the scenes, the government is having great difficulty finding an envoy who is acceptable to the many disparate Muslim communities in Australia.
Perception is almost everything in politics. The announcement of a Jewish envoy first reinforced Muslim resentment at being taken for granted. Albanese says the announcement of Segal was brought forward so she could attend an international conference of envoys in Argentina next week.
It could prove a costly accommodation politically. The president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, Nasser Mashni, told Guardian Australia the government should work “to realise equal rights and justice for all rather than pitting parts of the Jewish community against the Palestinian and Muslim communities – and against each other”.
Acting opposition leader Sussan Ley welcomed the Segal appointment and made no criticism of the failure to announce an Islamic envoy at the same time. Indeed, the Coalition has studiously avoided expressing much, if any, sympathy for Palestinians – a political calculation that suggests it is not chasing the same votes as Labor and the Greens.
Payman and the Palestinian recognition issue has certainly been a distraction for the government. Her defiance was the preoccupation of journalists at every news conference the prime minister held this week.
For the opposition, it has been a welcome distraction. Peter Dutton spent the past couple of weeks, and the weekend, struggling with conflicting messages from the Coalition on migration, nuclear energy and tax relief.
The vagueness of his promise to dramatically cut migration spooked the business community and saw the Nationals carving out an exemption for their rural constituency.
Dutton’s tax reform plans have similarly been put on the never-never. “After the election,” as he told the Committee for Economic Development of Australia’s conference. Apparently voters are to take him on trust after his position went from repealing Labor’s fairer stage three tax cuts, to having even more tax cuts, to now not knowing exactly what he wants to do.
The “visionary nuclear policy”, as Liberal elder statesman John Howard lauds it, dared not speak its name at the weekend’s Liberal National Party annual conference in Queensland.
It was not mentioned in any of the policy motions and the state leader, David Crisafulli, widely thought to be on the cusp of winning the October state election, went into the conference resolutely saying it was not on his agenda. It rated no mention in his law-and-order speech to the conference.
Embarrassingly for Dutton, Crisafulli announced he would deliver all of state Labor’s big spending commitments announced in the Miles government budget.
Dutton’s keynote address nominated Labor’s spending as the cause of the cost-of-living crisis. If you take his criticism at face value he will be cutting the $315 billion of spending in the federal budget on the public service, pensions, health, education and infrastructure.
The opposition leader didn’t promise to do this, but he didn’t nominate any policies of his own beyond going “back to basics”, which Treasurer Jim Chalmers reminds us means a return to austerity.
Dutton and the Nationals’ federal leader, David Littleproud, did Crisafulli no favours when they told the conference they expected all the states to fall into line with their energy plans when they achieved a mandate at the next election.
It’s a pity for Labor that distilled anger over its handling of Gaza is keeping it from getting a run at its opponents’ scarce alternatives.
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