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Opinion
What a bizarre scene. The Albanese government, having spent the past few weeks very much dancing to the Coalition’s tune in responding to the Bondi terrorist attack, now finds the Coalition has torn itself apart over the choice of music.
First, three National Party members decided they’d rather violate the obligation of shadow cabinet solidarity than vote for legislation Sussan Ley had herself negotiated. Then, with astonishing speed, the Coalition was no more, the Nationals declaring they could no longer continue under Ley’s leadership. We’ve seen oppositions destroy themselves before over some wedge issue the government of the day relentlessly drives. But I don’t ever recall it happening over an issue the opposition had foisted on the government.
The legislation that hastened this, we should note, was itself a watered-down version of the very thing the opposition had been so vociferously demanding: laws expanding the criminalisation of hate. The fact even this diluted legislation was apparently too potent for Ley’s Coalition partners to stomach reveals just how thin those demands really were. Nothing distils that more than the part of the hate laws Ley forced the government to remove completely – which created new criminal offences for promoting hatred. These were direct adoptions of the antisemitism envoy’s recommendations: the very same ones Ley had castigated the government for failing to enact.
Suddenly, improbably, Albanese has a plausible claim to being the only party leader serious about implementing the envoy’s recommendations. He can also claim to have passed a legal package – spanning gun reforms and hate – whose broad contours are very much in line with public attitudes. That’s according to polling published this week in this masthead, which showed that by clear majorities, Australians supported both gun reforms and some legal response targeting purveyors of hate.
But perhaps most significantly, he can plausibly claim that in the strange political landscape we now inhabit, only the Labor Party could have achieved this. It passed these respective reforms separately, and with very different, even irreconcilable majorities the Coalition could never have wrangled. Indeed, the Coalition wouldn’t have wanted to wrangle anything on the gun reform legislation, which it flat-out rejected. But it now seems likely the Coalition couldn’t even have wrangled itself sufficiently to pass hate laws either.
That’s not some mere process error to be fixed by the parties having more and better meetings. It’s a function of a Coalition so impossibly at odds with itself that it could implode even when conditions were favourable, even when dictating terms. That’s because the philosophical and demographic divisions across the Coalition had become so deep, they could never fully agree on which terms to dictate. This can be masked as long as the opposition is in attack mode, as it has been in the wake of Bondi. But when it comes time to act – to form a policy or vote on a bill – the terms matter. And when it turns out they’re a mirage, it leaves us with this impression of a Coalition that cannot see a rake without stepping on it. Not even the rakes it put there in the first place.
This explains how this week’s polls were possible: one showing Australians were far more approving of Ley’s response to the Bondi attack than of Albanese’s; the other showing One Nation now ahead of the Coalition’s primary vote. That might seem contradictory, but actually the latter frames the former. Ever since the threat of One Nation emerged in earnest late last year, so much of the Coalition’s behaviour has been aimed at neutralising it. It’s in that spirit that it shifted its stance towards rejecting net zero and pledged a political debate on immigration, for example. And, we can now see, that was ultimately the spirit of its response to Bondi.
That wasn’t immediately obvious because the aftermath of such a terrible tragedy is one of those exceptional moments where both mainstream and One Nation-style expectations have much in common. There is power in projecting strength, clarity and firmness – in demanding instant action whether in the form of a royal commission or urgently recalling parliament to pass new laws. In taking every opportunity to talk about the evils of Islamist terrorism, or in the right-wing vernacular, “radical Islam”. No doubt, a good portion of this was also sincerely seeking to reflect the Jewish community’s anger, despair, fears and hopes. But it’s telling that when it came to the crunch, when it came time to put up votes in the parliament, the Coalition diverged from the Jewish community’s position and veered towards One Nation’s. Ley herself did this the moment she declared the original bill “unsalvageable” before trying this week to correct course and find a middle position. But the Nationals, whose seats One Nation most threatens, veered all the way and stayed there.
The result is that, despite all the missteps, the backdowns, and the damage Albanese has sustained in Bondi’s aftermath, Labor still finds itself alone occupying the centre of Australian politics. That’s not because Labor has somehow outmanoeuvred the Coalition in some devastatingly ingenious way, converting the Australian centre to Labor’s core beliefs. It’s because the Coalition vacated it.
I doubt Albanese quite knew what a mirage the Coalition’s terms were. It’s probably true that he initially tried to wedge the Coalition by combining his hate laws and gun reforms in a single, monster bill, knowing the Coalition would want to oppose the latter. It was probably a surprise to discover that in the end this was totally unnecessary because the hate laws alone were wedge enough. As a result, Albanese’s decision over the weekend to concede and split the bill in two has gone from a capitulation to a masterstroke. A bill that was friendless a week ago, and still has serious flaws, is now law. And the opposition leader’s tune sounds more like a requiem.
Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist.
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