The depth of Australia’s slide into an irrelevant and untrustworthy minnow on the global stage was demonstrated when distinguished UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese described the Australian prime minister’s refusal to criticise Donald Trump’s plan to turn Gaza into a neo-colonial capitalist venture for the benefit of his family and friends, as “pathetic”.

Her justifiable contempt for Australia’s typically fork-tongued position about genocide in Gaza, and silence on the obvious Israeli operations in progress to create Eretz Israel, was clearly expressed when she said, “If Australia is not ready to recognise the state of Palestine, it has nothing to say about the two-state solution. It has nothing to contribute when it comes to the two-state solution.”

She also noted that Australia “has obligations under international law not to aid and assist a system that is committing international crimes, as Israel is doing”, a pointed reminder that Australia is not only in the hot seat in relation to its failures to comply with ICJ rulings throughout 2024 until now, but is on the verge of implicitly accepting an incitement to ethnic cleansing and forced removal of all Palestinians from their homeland in Gaza.

From the perspective of Peter Dutton’s now hard-right jocularly-named “Liberal” opposition, Trump’s grotesque plan of depopulating Gaza to create “the Riviera of the Middle East” has elicited some clarity about what he considers should happen in Gaza.

Dutton spoke in support of Trump’s plan, virtually parroting Netanyahu’s praise of Trump for “thinking outside the box with new ideas”. Dutton called Trump “a big thinker and deal maker”, and a leader with “gravitas”, thereby identifying himself as one of the few leaders of a major political party outside the Netanyahu regime and within the heart of the Trump administration, to have openly expressed support for junking international law.

Dutton’s response was very similar to that of the authoritarian Orban government of Hungary and even more supportive than the Italian response, which probably places him fairly accurately in the global spectrum of right-wing ideologues.

It is equally interesting that the reaction of the Labor-Coalition political class overall was more feeble than just about anywhere else on planet Earth. Even US vassals and “allies” across Europe adopted more assertive rejections of Trump’s plan. Many states referenced international law, that the forcible transfer of people from their land is a crime against humanity, and that annexation violates people’s right to self-determination, a fundamental principle of international law.

In reality, the whole Labor-Coalition political class, across all jurisdictions, intends doing absolutely nothing to prevent the total destruction of Palestine, to whatever degree Israel and the US contravene international law, including all aspects of the genocide convention, all rights of self-determination, and crimes against humanity.

Albanese’s response that he wasn’t “going to give a running commentary” on Trump’s decisions was given added meaning when Australia joined Italy, Hungary and the Czech Republic in refusing to join dozens of countries — 79 in fact, including the UK, France and Germany — in expressing “unwavering support” for the International Criminal Court after Trump imposed sanctions on its staff.

Australia, of course, has nothing to say as Trump and his billionaire crew take a wrecking ball to the institutional structures of the US federal political system, dismantling whole government departments, replacing the separation of powers with executive orders, sacking thousands of federal workers in revenge purges, scrapping international aid including USAID, WHO and UNRWA programs and the UN Human Rights Council, cancelling climate change agreements and imposing sanctions, tariffs and claims on foreign territories and countries at whim, without negotiation and in violation of international agreements and international law.

As far as Australia is concerned, it will remain a “forever” servile colonial office manager and voice for US imperial interests, whatever form of government holds power in Washington, whether oligarchic capitalism at its most extreme, or fully-fledged neo-fascism. After all, it has an established a bipartisan political culture, extending back 30 years to the mid-1990s, of manufacturing fear of a continuous stream of internal-external threats, from “boat people”, “weapons of mass destruction”, religious extremists, Chinese within and without, Lebanese, Muslims in general, the LGBTQ community, “woke”, anti-monarchists and now — most especially now — the threat of opponents of genocide.

Fear of the “other” has prompted the normalisation of indefinite detention, the normalisation of concentration camps, the normalisation of dehumanisation, the normalisation of inhumanity and the normalisation of the rejection of international humanitarian law and justice in relation to the treatment of the most vulnerable people, a firm basis for a political culture to accept the next steps, those taken throughout 2024 to refuse to condemn genocide.

It has normalised within Australia negation of freedom of speech on an issue which should have the highest standing of all in its demands for freedom of expression – the fundamental right of any human to oppose genocide and ethnic cleansing. That normalisation has allowed people to be summarily dismissed from their jobs, to be sacked from their careers, to have employment contracts terminated at whim, and to have SLAPP suits launched against them to bankrupt them as well as silence them.

At the end of the 1930s, when the English novelist H.G. Wells (The War of the Worlds) visited Australia, he had no hesitation in describing it as a “half fascist state” after the Lyons government took umbrage at his description of Mussolini and Hitler as “criminal Caesars” and “freaks”, and calling Hitler a “certified lunatic”. Lyons reckoned that Wells spoke in “bad taste” and “indulged his well-known political sympathies”.

Dutton and Albanese are, in various ways, lineal descendants of Lyons, and this time there’s no Roosevelt in the White House and no Curtin in Australia to stop the rot, as demonstrated by Australia’s gift a few days ago of $800 million to Trump’s war machine as he simultaneously ramps up US military aid to help Israel annex the West Bank, create a playground for the rich and powerful on the skulls and skeletons of thousands of babies and children in Gaza, and destroy everything Palestinian in West Asia.

Unfortunately, the pathetic Labor-Coalition Australian political class has no one now of any “gravitas” at all, just a bunch of freaks who have created the basic infrastructure for imitating Trumpist authoritarianism.

https://johnmenadue.com/australian-politicians-are-now-just-pathetic-beyond-measure/

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.