Foreign events and global political trends from the war in Gaza to Donald Trump’s hyper-kinetic return to office are shaking up the political status quo. And not always in the most obvious ways.
“Domestic and international politics are now completely integrated,” says former home affairs department secretary and political observer Mike Pezzullo.
“Today we’re talking about Gaza. Next week it could be something jaw-dropping about Ukraine, then perhaps a flare up between China and the US.”
Each of these events — and the divided ways in which they are interpreted by voters through a fractured media — threatens to overshadow and distort politics in ways not seen “since the Vietnam War”, he warns.
As last week demonstrated, carefully calibrated campaign and media strategies are being derailed by events far away. Trump’s Gaza-as-Riviera hallucination shows it can happen in an instant.
Extremism or sensible centre?
For voters themselves, these developments are unfamiliar and ugly. They are testing and morphing definitions of the “political middle ground”. One person’s extremism is another’s sensible centre.
Tellingly, political strategists report community concern about “social cohesion” has spiked in recent weeks.
Some voters appear to be wondering what has happened to their country, they say. How did the conflicts of others arrive on these shores? Is my local community still safe? And who is protecting us? Others suspect these worries are being amplified for cynical political purposes.
Lack of social “cohesion emerges as an issue when there’s a risk of losing it”, says Pezzullo.
What is not clear — based on conversations over recent days in Canberra with all sides of politics — is which party this maelstrom will hurt or serve the most. In political terms, it’s very much a toss-up.
For Anthony Albanese, arguments over the war against Hamas and destruction of Gaza have seen him condemned as weak and reactive.
Labor has found itself squeezed between the outrage of pro-Palestinian Australians wanting stronger condemnations of Israel’s government and local Jewish communities suffering antisemitism.
That tension coalesced last week around criticism of the prime minister’s response to Trump’s Gaza’s takeover suggestion.
Albanese was chided by some for failing to slam the president’s desire to take an “ownership” position in Gaza, which some likened to ethnic cleansing.
Others saw Albanese’s failure to acknowledge Trump for trying something different in a tired conflict, and a sign he has not accepted how fast Australia’s closest ally is changing.
How Albanese’s handling of such vexed terrain plays out in seats as across western Sydney and Melbourne, home to large Muslim and Jewish communities, is very much front-of-mind for political strategists.
Teals, Libs are also challenged
Inner-city Teal or community independents are equally challenged, especially with MPs like Zoe Daniel, Monique Ryan in Melbourne and Allegra Spender in Sydney defending electorates with large Jewish populations.
It’s almost conventional wisdom among analysts that fears about antisemitism will send a wave of Teal voters back to the Liberal Party, even though Peter Dutton is more socially conservative than many voters in those seats.
There are worries for Dutton’s side as well, where an apprehension lingers that his staunch pro-Israel positioning undermines the Coalition’s need to attract new groups of voters in lower-income battlegrounds.
The last election was marked by drift among upper middle-class and professional voters away from the Coalition towards Labor and independents.
Which has left Dutton’s re-election strategy hinged on capturing seats with large ethnic communities. Many live under more economically challenged circumstances where cost-of-living pressures are most acute. In other words, ideal potential swing voters.
“This is where the Israel-Gaza thing doesn’t really neatly line up as a plus for the Coalition because the electorate has changed dramatically,” says John Kunkel, a senior economist at Sydney University’s US Studies Centre and a former top advisor to Scott Morrison.
“It’s a question of the size of the constituencies, in terms of sympathy for Israel versus sympathy for Palestinians. The maths of that aren’t straightforward.
“For the Coalition you also need to think there would be a lot of Muslims who voted against same-sex marriage — so socially conservative — but won’t vote for the Liberals Party because of Gaza.”
The Greens are rethinking their rhetoric
The Greens are also rethinking their approach.
Stung by setbacks in state and territory elections in the second half of last year, the party has toned down some of its more strident rhetoric, such as Adam Bandt’s repeated accusations that Israel is committing “genocide”.
Such language gives Labor hope it can fend off the Greens in progressive seats like Macnamara, currently held by Josh Burns, a prominent Jewish MP.
Albanese this week overturned long-standing Labor policy to pass mandatory sentencing laws for terror and hate crimes, not least to neutralise any charge from Dutton that the government is not taking antisemitism seriously enough.
The Greens for their part backed the hate crimes legislation, but argued against the mandatory sentencing. Daniel and Ryan, also voted against the mandatory minimum sentences.
“You cannot say you stand with the Jewish community if you vote against the real consequence that are necessary to deter this horrific conduct which we’ve seen in our country over the last 15 months,” said shadow home affairs minister James Paterson.
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Dutton is balancing a thin red line
Meanwhile, Dutton is balancing his own thin red line, between giving his base what they want — Trump-like certainty and culture-war take-downs — and appealing to the “broad middle” of the electorate that wants solutions to economic pain rather than political distractions.
There was an intriguing display of these political sensitivities during a Sky TV segment early on Thursday morning, with a panel discussion between Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young and former Nationals deputy PM Barnaby Joyce.
Asked to respond to Trump’s latest edict — in this case a ban on transgender people competing in women’s sport — Hanson-Young condemned it as a just another “culture war” deflection by a president avoiding hard solutions to the problems facing “every day mums and dads… trying to put food on the table”.
Joyce was then asked for his reaction, which long-term Barnaby-watchers would have assumed would trigger a full-throated condemnation of transgender people in women’s sport.
Instead, he sputtered. “God, I hate to say this, but I kind of agree a little bit with Sarah on this one. We’re focused on the cost of living … not the proclivities and issues of the United States on this issue.”
Hours later, Dutton told Peta Credlin that he backed the US President’s position. “I think that’s a perfectly reasonable position to hold”.
A bemused Hanson-Young told this column that the exchange demonstrates how Dutton is at risk of “getting sucked into Trump’s extremist vortex”.
Politically “it’s so cheap and easy, but it really distracts from talking about cost-of-living. I think that’s his biggest risk.
“Cutting waste in ideological programs is not putting money in the pockets of mums and dads. Cutting welcome-to-country ceremonies doesn’t make interest rates lower or make school fees cheaper,” she says.
Divisions, in other words, that derail social cohesion and leave voters bewildered, may yet backfire in an electorate seeking hard solutions.
