It seemed fitting somehow that the word “restraint” would trigger a fresh round of unhinging in Australia’s political discourse. I’m not sure whether this is deeply ironic or entirely predictable.
If you missed the fracas, let’s recap. Last Saturday, horrendous violence erupted in Israel and Gaza. Hamas was on a murderous rampage. As the world watched on in horror, Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, issued a brief statement on social media. Wong condemned the attacks “unequivocally”. She called for “indiscriminate” rocket fire on cities and civilians to stop. She said Israel had the right to defend itself. Then she added boilerplate diplomatic language counselling against escalation. “Australia urges the exercise of restraint and protection of civilian lives,” she said.
Wong’s statement wasn’t emotional. It was clinical. Given the world was witnessing a horrifying apotheosis of extremism, calm and measured language felt like the appropriate response. Responsible foreign ministers aren’t generally cheer squads for conflagration or mass civilian casualties.
As the historian Yuval Noah Harari has noted this week, Israelis and Palestinians were facing their greatest moment of danger since 1948. Mass slaughter and the abduction of innocents by Palestinian militants would, understandably, trigger a lethal counteroffensive from Israel. Cause and effect, action and reaction; the risk of a second front opening up on the border with Lebanon, as well as the spectre of a full-blown humanitarian crisis in Gaza, was all too real.
Australia isn’t a substantial player in Middle East politics globally. But given the bruised sensibilities of the significant diaspora communities here, any sensible person occupying a public position would take a breath. Perhaps even summon up some gravitas. But in the way of things, Wong invoking the quality of restraint became a fresh cue for abandoning restraint in the Australian political conversation.
A dangerous escalation of violence in the Middle East should never be an opportunistic sound stage for performative partisanship. But it’s fair to say Peter Dutton and restraint are not natural bedfellows. As might have been predicted, this off-brand concept proved objectionable to the alternative prime minister of Australia.
“This is not the time for restraint,” Dutton thundered on Sky News. Furthermore, “people who try to draw a parallel or argue equivalence between Israeli activity now in their retaliation for these strikes and the barbaric attacks that we’ve seen by Hamas, I mean, there is no comparison and it’s appalling”.
Just to be clear, Wong’s statement wasn’t accusatory. There was no incendiary contention about equivalence. The only person fully intent on kicking a hornet’s nest was Dutton. It is important to be clear-eyed about what is happening in our politics. Escalation by escalation, embellishment by embellishment, the Liberal leader is inhabiting the zone of the political fabulist. Like Trump, sans charisma, Dutton is the dancing bear of the engagement economy, dishing up provocations intended to capture the attention of readers and viewers.
This opposition leader makes things up regularly, sometimes several times a day, with growing confidence. He’s fully intent on shaping his own reality, and why wouldn’t he be? Dutton’s accusations and inventions are amplified much more often than they are factchecked, parsed or decoded, because there is so much bollocking and barracking in the public square, people can’t see the bullshit.
That’s the point. That’s the strategy.
Authoritarian populists like Dutton set the media truth-seeking tests we cannot afford to fail. And yet we fail them. Time after time. Much of the mainstream media doesn’t seem that engaged with the measurable reality that the alternative prime minister of Australia has set his vocational GPS to post-truth and is picking up speed. I’m not sure why. That development seems pretty important from where I sit.
While the Liberal leader used a geopolitical crisis to monster his political opponents, the deputy leader, Sussan Ley, was a hall monitor handing out detentions. Anthony Albanese had been “one of the last world leaders to offer his support to Israel”. Albanese had failed to call the New South Wales premier “to demand police stop the hateful protest”. This tone policing was all pretty curious from a person who was once a prominent member of the Australian parliament’s friends of Palestine group. Ley, who grew up in the United Arab Emirates, once championed Palestinian statehood. More recently, she’s disavowed unilateral recognition.
What a grim week: a cocktail of opportunistic hyper-partisanship, rancorous polarisation and weaponised mendacity. The intemperance of the national political discourse was accompanied by pulses of intolerance in the community. I met a couple a few days ago who told me they’d been heckled by people handing out for the no campaign while casting a prepoll yes vote in a Victorian country town. They were perturbed by how heightened things were in their local community; the random act of intolerance and discourtesy to a quiet, middle-aged couple going about their democratic business felt unsettling.
It was chilling to see some pro-Palestinian protesters in Sydney shouting “fuck the Jews” and “fuck Israel” after so many innocents had been slaughtered in a barbaric terrorist attack. Young people at a music festival are hunted down and executed by militants in broad daylight – and the response is fuck the Jews. That’s more than unsettling. Antisemitism is utterly abhorrent. Today, yesterday and tomorrow.
But it was discomfiting too to hear Dutton escalating yet again, championing mass deportations of protesters attending demonstrations in Australia. This was the Liberal leader on Thursday. “If there were people [at the protests] who were on visas, they should be identified and have their visas cancelled. They should be deported.” Anyone who breaks the law should obviously be punished. But why should people be deported en masse for exercising their rights in a democracy lawfully and peacefully? Peaceful protest remains an important safety valve in a democracy, allowing people to express their views without resort to bloodshed.
The voice referendum has opened the door to all manner of awfulness, both strategic and opportunistic. Added to the national trauma of a referendum campaign that didn’t feel like a fair fight is the unsettling domestic fallout of the horrors in Israel and Gaza.
The combination of the two events delivers cultural conditions where people don’t feel seen and they don’t feel safe. We are being tested. Australia is being tested. Our social cohesion is being tested.
Even before the current challenges, data from the Scanlon Foundation last year put social cohesion at an inflection point. Inflation has roared back, increasing the price of food, power and petrol. Australians are worried about the rising cost of living. Anxiety about the biggest health crisis in a century has been replaced by anxiety about war, regional geopolitical instability, the climate crisis and economic turbulence.
If the polls are correct, a majority of Australians will repudiate a request from Indigenous Australians for a constitutionally enshrined advisory body when they vote in the referendum today. Many people will reject the voice because they are too worried about bread-and-butter issues to focus on the merits of the proposal. Strategists say many Australians haven’t been open to persuasion because their minds are resolutely elsewhere. The ceaseless noise and incivility of the campaign is a barrier to entry for this cohort.
Dutton didn’t have to stage the voice referendum as a political death match. He didn’t have to be the figurehead of fear and fake news. But he did it anyway. Ask Ken Wyatt how he feels about Dutton’s choice. On Friday the former Liberal minister for Indigenous Australians lamented the recurrence of bad behaviour. The “fearmongering”. The failure to be factual.
Mike Burgess, the head of Asio, also found himself frustrated about counter-productive behaviour; about (dare we say it) a lack of restraint. Burgess wasn’t talking about the grotesquery of the referendum campaign when he made a public plea late this week for people to get a grip. But he may as well have been.
Burgess was worried about the “tragic events in the Middle East”. More specifically, he was worried about “the potential for opportunistic violence with little or no warning”. In a rare public intervention the Asio chief reminded “all parties” to understand they were operating in the real world, where words carried “implications for social cohesion”. There were “direct connections between inflamed language and inflamed community tensions.”
That guidance seemed pretty pointed. But Dutton didn’t think Burgess was rebuking him. Australians will make up their own minds about that.
