The crisis in the Middle East highlights foreign influence over politics at home

A disproportionate response to social cohesion from our political class threatens to unravel national unity.

The PM has received jeers from a community that his party has bent over backwards to appease. (Source: YouTube)

2024 has not been comfortable or nice for the Australian people. After a decade of Coalition policy failure, and a replacement Labor government who has done little to alter the morbid status quo - a bipartisan malaise has washed over a public tempered to their wits end after bushfires, floods, pandemics, militarism, a cost-of-living crisis, and decades of government mismanagement. And now there is a state sponsored Genocide being perpetuated by Israel in the Middle East, and the topic is blocking out the Australian national discussion, revealing a dangerous influence over our domestic politics.

In the wake of the Ripponlea Synagogue arson attack that is under current Victoria Police investigation, the national discussion has turned into foreign influenced free-for-all. The Albanese government was quick to call the attack antisemitic, and rapidly announced additional funding for the Jewish community. But although the Albanese government has offered expansions to museums, special envoys, funding for security, regular announcements of solidarity, issued draconian legal amendments, gifted police special powers, and even tacit support for Israels actions throughout most of its nearly fifteen month long genocide, it seems Premiers, MPs, and even Prime Ministers aren’t spared public jeers by pro-Israel elements who vexatiously berate the suggestion of even a rudimentary ceasefire.

The Albanese government came to government in 2022 with a small target strategy that masked a lofty suite of consequential sovereign alterations that have prepared the ground for this environment. Between its inoffensive and watered-down policy offerings with coalition approval and tacit media support, it has been Labor that has codified the half-a-trillion-dollar sovereign quagmire that is AUKUS, and Labor that has been on the clock overseeing the captaincy in which Israel has been actively slaughtering innocents in Gaza. Leading up to their dogged term of government, the members spoke via the Labor National Convention to reflect a wider cohort of Australian voters who were against AUKUS, and in favour of recognising the Palestinian state. And this adopted platform has been ignored to the point where they were willing to ostracise and cast aside their youngest senator Fatima Payman, and prepared to shred their chances at the next election.

On the other side of this crisis is Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. Parting so heavily from the model of moderate Australian national leader on so many glaring and unelectable points, but none sticking out more than his firebrand support for Israel, Dutton stands competing with some wild company to be the most pro-Zionist political leader in Australian history, and in the running for the title for the entire OECD. Buffeted by the most concentrated and overtly pro-Israeli media apparatus in the world, the LNP ideology has transmogrified in the short time since the last dying gasps of Malcolm Turnbull and the Liberal moderates, and Dutton has dragged the political franchise kicking and screaming into bleak and morbid uncharted territory.

In the fifteen months straight of physical slaughter in the Middle East, Australians have been bombarded with incessant and endless information by foreign owned corporate press machines, and ideologically compromised politicians. Behind the military machine that tears at unarmed human flesh, are the running gears of a callous media that drives forward impossible genocidal agendas that are incompatible with our way of existence, and in Australia, this is evidenced on the front page of the concentrated tabloid flotilla that fires broadsides into the soft underbelly of our secular nation. Every day - for fifteen months - the second biggest donor to Benjamin Netanyahu, Rupert Murdoch, has unleashed his hounds into a bleak and morally treacherous territory not yet penned to paper in this sleepy island continent until now.

Mid-genocide, the front pages of ‘The Australian’ have lobbed verbatim Israeli propaganda, Sky News has become an extension of Israeli state television, and the pundits have spoken about things that children should never hear, with the sole aim of justifying this massacre. Dual passport holding anchors meet Benjamin Netanyahu, unlimited newspaper oped real-estate is provided to a single family, every subject matter expert critical of Israel is vetted with “Do you condemn Hamas?”. And behind all the toxic wake of the Murdoch incinerator burning morbid appendages of horrible ideologies, journalists at the public broadcaster alarmingly fan the flames, and the public gags on the thick noxious plume billowing out of our fourth estate.

It doesn’t help when Benjamin Netanyahu and Isaac Herzog can take their time out of their busy days rendering mass death onto Gaza, Lebanon and Syria to interfere in a Victorian state domestic police investigation, only to denigrate a sovereign elected Federal Leader for unleashing terror on the Jewish community, when police haven’t even identified the perpetrators or revealed the motive. While Islamic school busses and Sikh Temples burn in ‘arson’ attacks, perpetrated by hateful and extreme elements in our society, the double standards become clear, and moderate Australians from both side of the political isle question why Zionists have our elected officials by the short and curlies.

But here in the ideological Terra Nullius controlled by a strange entanglement of duopolistic corporations, political parties and media juggernauts, as the pile upon pile of documented genocide tilts the scales, the powerful forces in Australia seem to go the other way, urging narratives towards the more unacceptable.

Now is the time for the government to stand up for itself on this issue. It can obviously feel the heat in the electoral polling, it surely is facing internal debate, it clearly has isolated itself from its base and even ostracised and outcast one of their own Senators for reminding them so. Peter Dutton and the LNP have jumped the gun with their absolutism, baring a set of teeth that even make their own voters concerned, and like Labor voters, Coalition voters too are worried about foreign influence in our domestic affairs and dangerously compromised political captives harkening to an authoritarian future to please their foreign masters. Labor has taken a stance calling for an unconditional ceasefire at the UN, and has the opportunity to repudiate Dutton and his misguided and bleak ideology.

Selfish decision-making in the interests of powerful minority interest groups have been under the microscope increasingly, as most Australians pockets are no longer lined sufficiently enough to turn a blind eye to the wasteful and nepotistic dance between the seemingly conjoined politicians and oligarchs. When a new dozen coal and gas projects go up to tax dodging major polluting multinationals, people don’t avert their gaze any more. When half a trillion is pissed away on a vague military arrangement that hands our sovereignty away without producing any submarines, people are doing more than scratching their head. So when a tiny group of ideological extremists disproportionately hold our country’s debate hostage, Australians are taking notice.

Its not just the tens of thousands that have protested continuously for over a year, it’s the broader and diverse Australian community, each with their own stake in this nation. It’s a reasonable position to call for a ceasefire, it also should be a reasonable decision to suspend economic and diplomatic ties with Israel. Like Dutton, Israels most vocal supporters have become unreasonable in their expectations, ignorant to the fact that most Australians can’t share their irrational zeal that argues for the genocide to continue unabated, and can’t view Israels victims with the dehumanising enmity that is borne from this un-Australian way of thinking.

For over a year, the world has been frozen in a tragic state, as the most brutal repression of human life in recent memory is inflicted on the people of Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria, and beyond. As the heavy-handed response to an act of terror more than a year ago rapidly shifted into genocidal action of territorial expansion and biblically charged revenge, so too has shifted the majority public opinion of the human race, including the majority of Australians. The Murdoch’s, Dutton’s and pro-Israel ‘charities’ of the country want to create an Australia that hasn’t existed before. The callousness on display, the sociopathic efforts to prop up a genocide - are incompatible with the Australian DNA - and the dark edicts spun from their ivory towers are disturbing to us all.