Grattan on Friday: Whatever the government does, Albanese struggles to strike the right note in antisemitism battle

Anthony Albanese points to the array of measures his government has taken to tackle the scourge of antisemitism. But he can’t escape the impression of seeming perennially on the back foot and often lacking adequate empathy and sensitivity in dealing with the issue.

On the latter point, take Australia’s representation to next week’s commemoration in Poland marking 80 years since the last people were freed from Auschwitz.

It’s a major international event, with King Charles and some national leaders, including France’s President Emmanuel Macron, attending. The Australian government is sending two cabinet ministers: Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus.

Dreyfus, as the most senior Jewish member of the government, is a logical attendee. But Wong is a controversial choice. She is regarded negatively by many in the Australian Jewish community who, to put it bluntly, see her as unsympathetic to Israel and too influential with the PM.

Wong is travelling to Poland on her way back from the Trump inauguration. That might be convenient. But surely it would have been more appropriate and astute to have chosen Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles to lead the Australian delegation to Poland. Marles commands considerable respect in the Jewish community (and also outranks Wong).

This week Albanese suddenly reversed his firm opposition to calling a national cabinet meeting on antisemitism, convening one immediately in the wake of the attack on a Sydney childcare centre. The meeting was long overdue but something of a farce, held in haste and producing the underwhelming decision to set up a national database of antisemitic incidents. That just invited the question: why didn’t we have such a database long ago?

The national cabinet followed calls from, among many others, the government’s own special envoy to combat antisemitism, Jillian Segal – calls that should have been listened to earlier. But Albanese had argued people wanted action rather than meetings, and that he was consulting with the premiers of NSW and Victoria, where the attacks have been concentrated.

The delay in calling a national cabinet was a repeat of Albanese dragging his feet last year on setting up a special operations force led by the Australian Federal Police.

Albanese was once again put in the shade this week by NSW Premier Chris Minns, when the two appeared at a news conference after the torching of the childcare centre.

Minns, who declared the perpetrators of the crime “bastards”, sounded assertive; Albanese looked the minor player, feeding into the federal opposition’s general attack on him as a “weak” leader.

The government is feeling the heat on multiple fronts to get on top of the antisemitism crisis, with Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel (who once worked as a veterinary nurse in Bondi) launching fresh criticism this week, saying provocatively: “What are they waiting for? For someone to die? For someone to be murdered?”

It’s not just the government that’s under increasing pressure. So are the police (federal and state) and ASIO.

Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw was anxious this week to demonstrate the police were achieving some successes, and to say they anticipated more in the near future. As much as anything, the message was a plea for the community, and especially the Jewish community, to be patient.

Kershaw revealed the AFP believes “criminals for hire” may be behind some incidents, adding: “So part of our inquiries include: who is paying those criminals, where those people are – whether they are in Australia or offshore – and what their motivation is.”

Despite this tantalising piece of information, the impression is the agencies are largely in the dark about the intricacies of this wave of antisemitism. There doesn’t appear (so far) to be evidence of foreign actors, state or non-state, or domestic extremist organisations being the drivers.

For many voters, while they condemn the wave of antisemitism, it remains a niche issue. But it feeds into wider, easily triggered, concerns about crime and security, and that helps Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.

The Australian Financial Review’s latest Freshwater poll asked people to rank priority areas on which the government should focus. Crime and social order ranked fifth out of 16 issues; 26% of people put it in their top three. It has an eight-point lead over the issue of environment and climate change.

Dutton has promised the Coalition would legislate for mandatory minimum sentences for antisemitic crimes. That may go down well with some voters, but despite the circumstances and the fact courts can be too lenient (Minns complained strongly this week about one NSW sentence), it would be bad policy, robbing the legal system of flexibility to take account of individual circumstances.

While the authorities and the headlines are rightly focused on the antisemitism crisis, the government’s special envoy to combat Islamophobia is warning against letting the absence of dramatic attacks blind people to the presence of that menace.

Writing in The Australian, Aftab Malik said that during extensive travels around the country late last year, he found “a landscape in which Islamophobia was an ordinary daily experience for many Muslims.

"Thankfully, it wasn’t that mosques were being torched or cars vandalised.” But, he argues, “The ordinariness of Islamophobia is what is so disturbing, the normalcy of hate endured out of the media spotlight”.

If Dutton became prime minister, we know he would be stronger on antisemitism, and would move to repair relations with Israel. With the polls now giving the Coalition a chance of victory, or at least of running the government close, we need to know more about how a Dutton government would rebuild Australia’s social cohesion more broadly, including dealing with Islamophobia and managing and fostering multiculturalism.

The opposition’s current approach is to downplay Islamophobia on the grounds we are not seeing dramatic incidents of the kind we are currently witnessing with antisemitism. But a Coalition wanting to promote community harmony should not ignore or dismiss its risks, even while attention is firmly on the more dramatic and visible disease.