Albanese betrays. By The Spectator.
On the Royal Commission:
Yet he immediately devalued the undertaking in two ways.
First, he named a commissioner who does not enjoy the Jewish community’s unqualified support, an appointment that is read as reassuring the government rather than those most directly affected.
Second, he framed antisemitism not as a discrete ideological, religious or security problem to be fearlessly confronted but as a social friction to be managed in the interests of ‘national consensus’, with explicit warnings against outcomes that might ‘undermine social cohesion’.
In effect, the commission is invited to examine antisemitism only to the extent that it does not disturb the social arrangements that have allowed it to metastasise, or provoke a backlash from those inclined to deny or minimise it.
That constraint is explicit in the terms of reference. The commission must operate ‘in a manner that does not occasion prejudice to current or future criminal proceedings or national security or undermine social cohesion’. This is extraordinary. Royal commissions exist precisely to expose failures, even when they embarrass governments or agencies. Here, the commissioner is effectively instructed to self-censor where findings intersect with prosecutions, intelligence operations or politically sensitive communal tensions.
Nor is there clarity about ideology. Islamism, jihadism, Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Muslim Brotherhood and other transnational movements are referred to obliquely as ‘religiously or ideologically motivated extremism’. This matters because antisemitism is not merely a diffuse social prejudice. In certain Islamist traditions, it is a theological and political fixation; taught, justified and mobilised. To obscure this is to obscure the problem itself.
The consequence is an incentive toward opacity: closed hearings, redactions, and a sanitised report. …
These constraints suggest a process designed to relieve political pressure without offending the all-important Muslim vote. It is a Claytons royal commission: the one you have when you’re not having a royal commission.
Legislation should be specific to the problem it wishes to solve.
Bondi was an Islamic terror attack. The Prime Minister’s Omnibus Bill must therefore be tightly contained to deporting, arresting, and disbanding Islamic terrorists.
Albo’s not wasting this opportunity:
If activists on the Left have other people they wish to silence and oppress, they must do so in broad daylight and take it to the people, not sneak their dark fantasies into a reactionary bill.
Hate Speech: when the government tells us ‘Christmas’ and ‘Easter’ are offensive and have to be replaced by ‘Happy Holidays’. But Ramadan is fine.
These micro-aggressions against Australians now feel enormously oppressive.