Albanese appoints left-wing progressive to head his Royal Commission.
Jewish leaders unite against Virginia Bell as royal commissioner. By Greg Brown in The Australian.
A growing number of Jewish leaders are raising alarm with Virginia Bell emerging as Anthony Albanese’s potential pick for royal commissioner, warning that consensus on who was chosen to lead the public inquiry “should be a minimum requirement” for the government. …
Mr Frydenberg said … “… it is unthinkable the Prime Minister would choose a commissioner that did not have the total confidence of the Jewish community.” …
Jewish leaders and the families of the Bondi victims are calling for the royal commission to investigate Islamic extremism in Australia and the demonisation of Israel as part of a wide-ranging examination of anti-Semitism. …
Greatness eludes Albanese once again. By Henry Ergas in The Australian.
Edmund Burke … warned the House of Commons that free societies “are not primarily ruled by laws; still less by violence”. They rest instead on “a bond of trust” – the trust that persuades citizens to vest governments with the powers needed to secure peace and prosperity.
That trust, in turn, depends on credible mechanisms that place the governors, not the governed, under constant and effective scrutiny. …
Royal commissions [serve] as a crucial safeguard: when things went badly wrong and the community demanded answers, an impartial, public and transparent process would provide them.
It is that safeguard Albanese sought to dismantle. His refusal to establish a royal commission into the management of the pandemic was an early signal that the longstanding compact between government and the governed would be set aside. The attempt to reject a royal commission into spiralling anti-Semitism — and its escalation into outright murder — marked its shocking apotheosis.
This was no accident or momentary lapse. It reflects an implicit calculation that public opinion, in anything like its traditional sense, no longer imposes a serious constraint. The fragmentation and polarisation of the public sphere; the splintering of media authority; the confidence that those outlets retaining influence with the government’s supporters — above all, the ABC — are simply mouthpieces for left-leaning propaganda; and the political exhaustion induced by incessant torrents of competing claims and counterclaims have, in Labor’s view, stripped public opinion of its capacity to compel action.
In those circumstances, calls for accountability can be ignored, while moral authority lacking institutional force is easily brushed aside. As Stalin is reputed to have asked of the pope: How many battalions does he command? In contemporary politics, the question is more prosaic but no less corrosive: How many votes do moral imperatives actually move?
Once that calculation is made, accountability ceases to be a principle and becomes an inconvenience. What was once routine evasion hardens into something more serious: the hollowing out of a constitutional safeguard that generations rightly regarded as indispensable.
Pauline Hanson unleashes about the three words Anthony Albanese refused to say while calling a Royal Commission into antisemitism. By Nicholas Comino at The Daily Mail.
Pauline Hanson has accused Anthony Albanese of refusing to name radical Islam as ‘the real problem’ in the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack.
The One Nation leader slammed the recently announced Royal Commission into antisemitism as ‘fundamentally compromised’ and ‘a waste’ unless it probed the extremist ideology that allegedly inspired the gunmen.
Hanson said the Prime Minister had ‘failed a basic test of leadership’ by sidestepping ‘the three words Australians expected to hear’.
‘Prime Minister Albanese refused to say three words while calling his Royal Commission: Radical. Islamic. Terrorism,’ she wrote in a fiery statement on Friday.
‘The Prime Minister won’t even say the problem out loud.
Everyone knows where an honest inquiry into the Bondi massacre will lead. It ends up at the Koran. And then what? It would be electorally catastrophic for Labor, so that’s unacceptable.
But truth is a stubborn thing.
On the other hand, there is the ABC. Their news item last night on the announcement of the Royal Commission entirely omitted the words “Islam” or “Muslim.” (Exercising considerable restraint, they also didn’t say “Nazi.”) But when the next story came up, about hero Ahmed Al Ahmed who tacked one of the terrorists, they were quick to describe him as Muslim. Yes ABC, we get it — only good things can be said about Islam in ABC world.
Btw, Ahmed Al Ahmed is a big fan of Donald Trump, declaring upon arriving in New York: ”He’s (President Trump) is a hero of the world, I love him, he’s a strong man.”