We’re weeks away from an election. The economy is floundering, social cohesion is under unprecedented strain, and we’re saddled with the most militantly left-wing government in memory. You’d expect right-of-centre parties to seize this moment, unite, or at least stay focused. You’d be mistaken.
Last week, the discourse veered into absurdity. Senator Gerard Rennick suggested Israel’s Mossad had ‘infiltrated News Corp’, tying it to a Daily Telegraph crew allegedly filming a Jewish man at a café whose owner has made remarks widely considered antisemitic.
Think about it: a tiny nation, fighting multiple wars, deploys its elite spy agency, fresh off operations like the Hezbollah beeper strike and the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, to orchestrate a stunt at a café in a hipster Sydney neighbourhood, all while encouraging the media to film their agent. It’s laughable.
When called out by James Macpherson on Sky News Australia, Rennick didn’t apologise. He doubled down, Tweeting out a list of accusations against the IDF and the Mossad including one about an accidental sinking of a ship in 1967.
Rennick gripes about News Corp’s coverage of Australia’s antisemitism crisis. As a Jew, I can’t overstate how grateful my community is to News Corp for doing the job that Australia’s public broadcaster should be doing and exposing the hate that Jews currently face.
It’s not necessarily malice. Living in Queensland, Rennick may not grasp that Jewish pre-schools in Sydney and Melbourne need armed guards or appreciate the fear that Jews feel after seeing a synagogue torched, houses targeted, and a daycare centre burned to the ground.
I’ve met Gerard and admired some of his past stances, which makes this descent so disappointing.
More concerning was an anti-Israel Tweet late on Thursday night from the NSW Libertarian Party’s account. The rant falsely claimed that Australian taxpayers were ‘funding both sides of the same war’, singling out an Austrade office in Tel Aviv and the critical F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program.
Australia provides no foreign aid to Israel and has never been asked to. We do give tens of millions annually to the Palestinian Arabs.
Tel Aviv is one of the world’s global tech powerhouses and has among the highest number of startups per capita in the world. Australian businesses learn from Israel’s start-up culture and all Australians benefit from the trade.
Australian companies won contracts worth billions to provide components for the F-35 jets which Israel acquires through the US. These commercial deals benefit Australian manufacturing companies and workers.
Since when do Libertarians despise capitalism?
These university-politics-style comments without a thought to Australia’s defence or economy sound more like the NSW Greens than the NSW Libertarians. Hopefully, Israel and other allies don’t adopt that stance with Australia when China comes knocking.
The post, possibly the work of a rogue social media manager, tarnished the Libertarian brand and candidates nationwide.
It’s unlikely that attacks on Israel have the support of Libertarian Members of Parliament, current or former, who are all quite sensible.
Unless they distance themselves from this trash quickly, the Libertarian Party will lose the votes of Jews who would have voted for them. Jews are a tiny fraction of voters but more significantly, many Christians and others who care about Western values will not vote for a party that joins the leftist pile-on against Israel.
The irony is that Libertarian icon, Javier Milei is probably the world’s most pro-Israel leader.
He and President Trump are overturning decades of leftist Israel-hate.
This battle is also playing out overseas. The right overwhelmingly supports Israel as it fights enemies of the West. However, there is a fringe, rising in prominence of misfits, like Nick Fuentes, grifter and Muslim convert Andrew Tate, and the mentally unwell Kanye West. Candace Owens sounds possessed as she comes up with antisemitic conspiracies about breakaway Jewish groups from the 1700s. Tucker Carlson is more sophisticated. Careful never to say the crazy part himself, he instead invites Holocaust deniers and others to peddle their lies to millions.
Clive Palmer’s new Trumpet of Patriots is an unknown but trumpeting Tucker’s endorsement isn’t a great sign.
Bad actors have infiltrated and attempted to take over political parties in Australia before. In 2018, the National Party expelled extremist members after an investigation, setting a guiding example.
Today, multiple parties to the right of the Coalition compete for a small pool of votes, however Opposition Leader Peter Dutton doesn’t carry the same baggage as Scott Morrison or Malcolm Turnbull.
These parties must choose: embrace fringe conspiracies or pitch a serious vision for Australia.
Weeks from a federal election, with the chance to remove one of the worst governments in Australian history, this all seems like a very unnecessary distraction.