“Which is the sanction you would like?”

The government has shown to carry over with the lowest common denominator on responding to the genocide in Gaza.

Anthony Albanese’s government is lagging behind the OECD in recognition of Palestine and action against Israel as the impacts of genocide compound in Gaza every day. (Source: YouTube)

“What we haven’t done is gone for slogans, frankly,” was the sharpened reply Prime Minister Anthony Albanese gave to an incrementally more inquisitive press throng regarding Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This time, a question on why his government hasn’t imposed broader sanctions on the Israeli government. The Prime Minister seemed to stare out for a small moment, looking for something both meaningful and deflecting he could say. “Which is the sanction you would like?” was all he could muster in an expression of annoyance—his prefect-like boyishness ceding to the political honey-badger that is Albo.

Albanese’s reply ricocheted back towards journalist Rania Yallop, in the form of such a seemingly condescending question, and with a few shakes of the head, the PM huffed at the young journalist to respond. “What people have been calling for… (are) sanctions on the broader Israeli government,” was the response Yallop gave. “They don’t call for that, that’s the point,” said an instantly annoyed PM, providing another opportunity to reveal the ideological chasm that sits between the political class and the population of Australia. “What we are about is meaningful actions,” Albanese said as he dropped another bunch of weightless words that echoed distantly across the vast empty gorge.

The ‘meaningful actions’ are up for debate and have been a little from column A and a little from column B. Some of those meaningful actions could include cutting UNRWA funding that began the assault on the capability of the UN to be able to distribute aid, moving forward with a $900 million Elbit Systems military contract mid-genocide, or supplying vital components to supply chains. Some of those actions could be seen as barely any actions at all.

The Labor government would like to claim that some of those ‘meaningful actions’ include sheepish bloc votes in the UN, hushed diplomatic finger-wagging, and flowery letters suggesting friends behave better. Yet fifty shades of concern are not enough—not while the worst concentrated human killing since WWII is taking place in 2025, not while it still grants economic, diplomatic, and militaristic normalcy with Tel Aviv, especially not while nations of the beleaguered West are slowly dropping their guards and taking action to sanction Israel and recognise Palestine.

Canada and Germany (who militarily support Israel directly) joined the growing list of countries that chose to recognise the state of Palestine, joining Britain (who militarily support Israel directly), France, and the growing wave of Western nations beginning the process of recognising the state of Palestine. From sanctions and visa bans to recognition and demanding protection of the Palestinian people, more governments are beginning to take quantifiable action. Australia offered another statement that was lacking any action at all.

Australia has had a modern history of speaking out against crimes against humanity around the world in the interests of preserving the international system and its laws. This was stripped in the era of Howard and the global war on terror, as Australia stopped meaning what it said on the world stage and spoke about the virtues of rights and justice while our defence force was kicking unarmed prisoners off cliffs in foreign expeditionary wars of plunder in far-away lands.

Now, cast against the backdrop of Australia’s complicity in Israel’s genocide, as the government seeks to not fulfil the actions Albanese says we are not calling for, the government loses its prestige, flailing in the quagmire it has built for itself playing political checkers on a morally repugnant chessboard. And by virtue of daring to play, when Penny Wong speaks of a humanitarian issue on Hong Kong or urges for restraint in a dispute between Cambodia and Thailand, she looks like a hypocrite. When Richard Marles mumbles more vaguely defined over-commitment to Trump’s Washington, he sounds like an ideologically captured warmonger without a sovereign bone in his body.

When the Prime Minister of Australia fluffs up the scruff of his neck like a political Pomeranian and barks at his country filled with humans that are scarred from seeing dead children on their socials for over 650 days, while the ‘civilised world’ is dropping like flies to take action in light of the scale and impact of this genocide, and his government is still supplying F-35 parts to Israel, he doesn’t look so good scolding journalists for finally beginning to ask pertinent questions about what his government is doing to pressure Israel to end its genocide.

Without the media willing to unpack the situation, it is left to those on the outside to find the stars in the opaque firmament as to what motivates Canberra’s tragically lethargic position towards meaningful action against the genocidal state of Israel. Canada shares a land border with the US, it was threatened with absorption by Donald Trump, and it has much more to risk with Washington than Canberra does by announcing its recognition of Palestine. Britain is directly fuelling, arming, and providing aerial intelligence to the IDF, it acts as Washington’s deputy in Europe, and even Keir Starmer can manage the step to recognise Palestine. So why is it so hard for the Labor government that channels the ghosts of former greats who helped to end apartheid not so long ago in South Africa?

For nearly two years, Albanese’s government has taken a cake-and-eat-it-too philosophy with its tired small-target strategy to its position on the catastrophe in the Middle East. Wedged between the disproportionately powerful Zionist interest groups, the increasingly volatile relationship with Washington, combined with the nattering of the unreasonable and objectively recalcitrant Coalition, the concentrated Murdoch-domineered ideologically Zionist media, the torrent of doctors, academics, multi-faith humanitarian groups (including Jewish), and the majority of Australian people sick of a genocide, the government has been juggling a morbid array of balls for a prolonged awkward period, looking to please everyone and succeeding in doing the opposite. As the government juggles, hops, and goes one step forwards and two steps back between Mark Leibler, the people of Australia, and everyone in between, it can’t sit down in time playing the musical chairs of responding to this genocide. And it looks like an international pariah for daring to do so.

Even considering politics for politics’ sake, referring to the actions of Germany, Canada, and Great Britain in moving to recognise Palestine—the decisions are politically prudent, and there are mounting political consequences for continuing not doing so. But Albanese and his brains trust, for all the political exceptionalism they focus on gleaning from the tea leaves at the expense of reading the pulse of the people and of reality, miss the political weight of their stance and snarl at journalists for beginning to ask effective questions. Now they lag behind Ursula von der Leyen’s Europe and hold positions more conservative than nations who have more to consider in recognising Palestine, who seem to understand the mounting consequences of maintaining the status quo at a reptilian political level. Why is this still evading Albanese, the founding member of the ‘Parliamentary Friends of Palestine’?

The bipartisan political class has gotten used to disregarding the Australian population almost totally in the calculus of its political equations and has been coming up with politically incorrect positions as a consequence. In this big island continent at the bottom of the earth where the tall poppies haven’t been cut in decades in Canberra, the political class sings almost entirely for an audience of oligarchs and foreign overlords. Opening royalty-free gas projects and handing away parcels of our sovereignty like generous portions of minimum chips to Washington, a bipartisan political class acts with impunity while turning the back on what ‘Australians have been calling for’ by callously claiming we ‘don’t call for that’.

The discombobulated oscillation between geopolitical pragmatism (Albanese’s successful visit to China) and ideological hopefulness (treaty with the United Kingdom) renders Australia’s current strategic outlook ineffective either way for its current support of the status quo and its insistence in lagging last in line to take action on Israel. For all the talk of ‘progressive patriotism’ developing in Canberra and the burgeoning reemergence of sovereign inklings being muttered by the government, the government looks incapable of imagining such a potential while it squares the circle and dithers on a genocide. Neither ‘progressive’ nor ‘patriotic’.

By losing our identity to the vultures of capital and the goals of foreign warmongers, Australia has been subject to an arc that has strayed from the national interest and sees government after government still in favour of a stance that doesn’t reflect the essence of the nation, moral reason, and refuses to even recognise the wishes of a population that would like to see it take pragmatic action in line with the majority of the world in pushing Israel to end its genocide of the Palestinians.

Unlike the global revulsion to this genocide, the pro-Israel interests, Washington’s primacy, along with the Coalition, and the subjective legacy media all have one thing in common: they are in decline. Canada, Germany, and Britain are beginning to come to terms with that in their decision to recognise Palestine. Not yet in Albanese’s Canberra. And as the script goes, as the government has shown to carry over with the lowest common denominator on responding to this genocide, we all know it will posit a similar position in the weeks to come—stripped of any meaning, morally pasteurised to the point of nothingness.