A government of false outrage, excuses and no consequences

From Israeli soldiers of genocide running through the streets of Sydney to One Nation’s rise, climate catastrophe and AI’s enormous power demands, Labor’s business-as-usual politics no longer works.

The political charade with Israel continues

The Sydney Marathon controversy – where around 40 Israel Defence Forces personnel from the infamous Golani Brigade and Unit 8200 participated – presents the Albanese government with that same old question it has repeatedly avoided for almost three years: when will condemnation of Israel actually produce some consequences?

There were protests surrounded the participation of these Israeli runners, including people connected to Israeli military operations in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, and the Australian Centre for International Justice did call on the government to investigate these runners but those calls were ignored, and the sportwashing of Israel’s genocide was allowed to continue.

Some of these IDF soldiers, including First Lieutenant Roy Oryon, were involved in the killing of 15 Palestinian paramedics, rescue workers and a UN employee, and are complicit in war crimes, human rights abuses, and genocide. Their visit to Sydney and participation in the Sydney Marathon was sponsored Zionist Council of NSW and the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, and the timing is absolutely abysmal.

A few days earlier, Israel’s military cleared its personnel of criminal wrongdoing over the strikes that killed Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom and six World Central Kitchen colleagues in 2024. The foreign minister Penny Wong responded with the usual “outrage” but it’s a pantomime that’s becoming Australia’s cheapest form of diplomacy: strongly worded, repeated at a regular cycle, but ultimately meaning nothing and achieving nothing.

There is real outrage within the Australian community about the lack of clear of response to the killing of Zomi Frankcom and the complete lack of accountability for the Israel Defense Forces and responses from our political leaders, even when the commander who ordered the attack, Colonel Nochi Mendel, proudly announced to the Australian media “I’m not sorry for what I did”.

This is Zionist arrogance at its regular and extreme levels: appearing on national television in the country of the citizen who was killed, not to apologise, but display all the behaviours that has made the state Israel one of the most despised countries in the world. It’s rubbing dirt into the faces of the Australian public.

And the government’s response? Keep on going with the weasel words, invite soldiers who have been complicit in a genocide to run around the streets of Sydney – even affording them a police escort and protection – and make it seem like this is normal behaviour. It’s the best advertisement to suggest that Australia is a capture state. It couldn’t be made more obvious.

Labor keeps misreading the surge of One Nation

One Nation’s emphatic victory in the Secret Harbour byelection in Western Australia on the weekend should worry the Labor government, but not for the reasons Anthony Albanese seems to think. Calling Pauline Hanson’s politics “dangerous” and “divisive” might be the message that the party faithful needs to hear – and saying this over the past 30 years doesn’t seemed to have worked – but it does nothing to explain why an electorate that’s been held by WA Labor for 37 years had an 18 percentage point swing against it.

There are many issues going on here: WA Labor has been very successful for almost a decade, and despite being a long-term government of nine years, it doesn’t show the signs of decay that have been apparent with the Victoria Labor government. The economy in Western Australin is strong, and has the benefit of a very favourable GST deal instigated by the Morrison government, which it has used to build infrastructure right across the city.

So why does a safe Labor electorate swing so drastically against a strong government that’s doing relatively well?

It’s the business-as-usual approach that’s the problem: the public is demanding different response from all governments, even voting for a party that is just a culture of complaint and offers no solutions at all, to send a clear message. And that’s the message that the federal government is failing to understand.

Housing remains unaffordable for many, rents are punishing, wages have struggled to keep pace, public services are stretched and economic insecurity has become normalised. The Albanese government has made attempts at many of these issues, but it’s been piecemeal and so insignificant that it’s hardly made any difference at all.

When governments fail to attend to these problems adequately, populists will always arrive with a simpler explanation: the problems exist because of immigration, the elites, bureaucrats, multiculturalism, Canberra, everything going woke, or far worse – communism!

It’s a cynical approach and deliberately inflammatory but it works: just ask Nigel Farage in the UK, who has turned this level of stupidity into an artform. And, essentially, it works because the underlying dissatisfaction is real.

Labor faces that dangerous path which it has already started going down: chase One Nation into an argument about immigration, rather than focus on the economic conditions, which then allows Pauline Hanson to set the agenda. And allowing a political idiot to set the agenda ends up getting us into this vicious and endless cycle of doom and despair that can never be remedied.

But there’s also an opportunity here, once the Labor government can work out what the message is. One Nation is discovering that winning seats is easier than governing and, of course, at this state, it doesn’t have to worry about governing.

But David Farley’s recent dispute with Hanson and Barnaby Joyce over migration numbers exposes the gap between slogans and workable policy, where Farley realises that regional economies – such as one in his seat of Farrer – need workers; that the infrastructure needs to be carefully planned; housing needs investment. None of this can be solved by shouting from the rooftops that everything is a disaster, and placing a bumper sticker on the back of a ute in the back streets of Albury.

Obviously, Secret Harbour was victory for One Nation, but it only holds one seat in a parliament of 59. That needs to be put into perspective. But the greater message is that it was a vote of no confidence in establishment politics, and that’s the issue that needs to change.

Climate catastrophe is no longer waiting for politics

The catastrophe across Nepal and Tibet is another reminder that climate change doesn’t act according to election cycles, opinion polling or the whims of governments. Global warming is destabilising glaciers, permafrost and mountain slopes across the Himalayas, increasing the risks that already vulnerable communities are expected to somehow idly sit by and just let it all happen.

The political cycle is painfully familiar and pretty much always the same. There’s a disaster that strikes – whether it’s floods or fires – leaders express sympathy, scientists explain the growing risks, governments promise to do something about it – but the economic system of unlimited growth that produced the problem continues undisturbed.

This contradiction will be difficult for Australia to avoid at the Pacific Islands Forum in Palau. Pacific governments have spent years trying to convince larger Western countries that climate change is their biggest security threat, while these far wealthier countries have been very good at producing communiqués – and organising the next international climate change conference – than providing the finances and support to reverse climate change that’s threatening to swallow up the whole world, not just the communities at the Nepal–Tibet border.

Australia’s position is problematic and hypocritical. The government wants to be regarded as the indispensable security partner in the Pacific region, while remaining a massive fossil-fuel exporter and opening up new mines. It keeps warning Pacific nations about China’s expanding influence but then is surprised when those countries look at what Australia does on climate change and then decide that their future is better guaranteed through the support of the Chinese government.

The events in Nepal provide the disturbing background to this situation and is a clear example of what climate scientists have been predicting for well over 50 years. The climate emergency isn’t something that’s approaching over some kind of distant horizon: it’s already here.

The AI comes with an enormous power bill and more greenhouse gases

According to the Prime Minister, Australia wants the investment, productivity and technological prestige that’s being promised by artificial intelligence. But what he seems to be far less enthusiastic about is discussing is the extraordinary amounts of electricity required to make the AI boom possible, where it’s going to come from, and who ultimately pays for the infrastructure behind it.

The federal government is proposing that these new data centres offset their enormous electricity demands with additional renewable generation – and wouldn’t it be great if Australia could do this by being the “renewable energy superpower” that Albanese promised in 2022 but has failed to deliver – but pressure from the Queensland and the Northern Territory governments has pushed the policy towards “technology agnostic” – a very convenience piece of terminology that keeps coal and gas as a part of the deal without politicians having to explicitly say so.

And, once again, we have more inherent contradictions within government policy, that is all about the politics and very little about community.

The public has been told many times that decarbonisation of the economy requires changing cars, their household appliances and energy consumption, while the government is doing its best to attract multinational technology companies that will add enormous new loads to the electricity grid. And guess who will be paying for it: it won’t be the government, and it won’t be the multinational tech companies. It will be the public that takes up the bill through higher retail energy prices. Perhaps sometime soon, the Labor government will understand why they are in line to lose more seats to One Nation.

Of course, there is a legitimate economic case for expanding Australia’s data-centre industry, and many countries are looking at developing domestic AI systems and software that can or will result from these data centres. But there are equally legitimate questions about the conditions that will be attached to these data centres.

Why shouldn’t companies creating massive new electricity demand be required to fund new renewable generation, storage and necessary infrastructure rather than pushing those costs and pressures onto consumers?

Australia can’t declare that climate change is an emergency, promise an energy transition and then quietly loosen the rules whenever large corporate investments arrive.

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