Inside politics: Was Albanese’s response to the synagogue attack really that bad?

Published Dec 12, 2024, 6:00 PM

This week was dominated by the appalling anti-Semitic attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue in Ripponlea in Melbourne’s south-east. There followed more attacks in Sydney - A car was torched in the Eastern suburbs, where there is a strong Jewish community, and houses there were graffitied with anti-Israel slogans. 

The violence was followed by political conflict. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was accused of not doing enough to quell anti-Semitism and make Jewish Australians safe. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was accused of politicising the whole issue. 

So could the PM have handled the week better? And what did his handling of the firebombing tell us about his powers of leadership? Will Dutton get any blowback for his lack of bipartisanship over the issue? 

Plus, Peter Dutton’s rejection of the Aboriginal flag, and Labor’s childcare policy.

Joining Jacqueline Maley to discuss is chief political correspondent David Crowe and political correspondent Paul Sakkal. 

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.

 

From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. This is inside politics. I'm Jacqueline Maley, it's Friday, December 13th. This week was dominated by the appalling anti-Semitic attack on the synagogue in Ripponlea, in Melbourne's south east. There followed more attacks in Sydney. A car was torched in the eastern suburbs, where there is a strong Jewish community, and houses there were graffitied with anti-Israel slogans. The violence was followed by political conflict. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was accused of not doing enough to quell anti-Semitism and make Jewish Australians safe. Peter Dutton was accused of politicising the whole issue. So could the PM have handled the week better? And what did his handling of the firebombing tell us about his powers of leadership? Will Peter Dutton get any blowback for his lack of bipartisanship over the issue? Plus, we will talk about Opposition Leader Peter Dutton's rejection of the Aboriginal flag, and we will check in on Labor's childcare policy. Joining us to discuss, we have, as usual, our very own David Crowe, chief political correspondent. And we also have Paul Satchell, political correspondent. Hi, guys.

Good morning today.

Let's recap the facts quickly, David. Last Friday, the Adath Israel Synagogue in Ripponlea in south east Melbourne was firebombed in a horrific attack. What do we know about the incident? Who did it and what was the possible motive for it?

Well, it's been declared terrorism. The opinion of the authorities is that it had an ideological motivation and basically it was an anti-Semitic attack.

Three terrorists are wanted for the firebombing of the Ripponlea synagogue.

Counter-Terrorism teams from the Victorian and Federal Police are meeting today in the wake of last week's fire at a Melbourne synagogue.

They spread an accelerant and lit that as an arson attack on this synagogue in Melbourne on Friday morning, in the very early hours of Friday morning, one man was injured. There were people inside the synagogue at the time that this arson attack took place. Nobody died, thank goodness, but it was one of the most serious anti-Semitic attacks we've seen.

Let's turn to the sort of political fight after this horrific bombing. Soon after the attack, the prime minister, who was in Western Australia at the time, he did put out a statement. Right, David?

Yes. And he condemned the attack. All sides condemned the attack. And all sides are concerned about anti-Semitism. The Prime Minister responded with a statement on Friday morning. He dialed into Melbourne radio to the RAF Epstein Show on ABC Local Radio in Melbourne to express his condemnation.

Condemn. This is an outrage. The violence and intimidation and destruction at a place of worship is something that we should never see in Australia.

But he was booked to go to Perth for various events, including, you know, the opening of a new train line and so forth, the kind of things that political leaders do. And so he continued with that plan and went to Perth. He then visited a synagogue in Perth on Saturday morning to show solidarity with the Jewish community. But he did some things that then left him exposed to political attack as well, because he went and played tennis on Saturday afternoon and some people thought that that was inappropriate in the circumstances. Meanwhile, the backdrop here is that there was this question about whether it was a terrorist attack, and there was a question about whether authorities were moving too slowly to declare a terrorist incident here. Yeah. Because as soon as it's declared a terrorist attack, it sort of changes in terms of who's involved in investigating. It no longer becomes just a state police matter and goes to a joint counter-terrorism task force with the Australian Federal Police involved. Yeah. And I think there's been a bit of an overblown argument about why didn't political leaders call it terrorism sooner? They did that on Monday, but they had to wait for the police authorities to decide that it was terrorism. And that's what political leaders normally do. They they take the advice of the official authorities.

I want to talk about that because those two things became conflated, didn't they? I mean, it took the police or the, you know, the relevant law enforcement authorities a few days, and it wasn't until Monday that they declared it was a terrorist event. And meanwhile, Anthony Albanese has been photographed at the tennis. He's not on site. He's over in Perth. And, you know, this left him open to all these attacks that the government's moved too slowly. He hasn't taken it seriously enough and that overall he has not done enough to combat anti-Semitism. Paul, this really the whole thing conspired to just kind of make a few very bad days of headlines for the prime minister in particular, didn't it?

Totally. And I think this synagogue attack has to be seen in the broader context of the debate around the government's positioning on Israel and the local debate on anti-Semitism. There's been months of criticism from the Coalition of labor shifting towards the Palestinian side of the question. Penny Wong has been accused of all manner of things, from the coalition being obsessed with Israel, being an enabler of extremism, some pretty trumped up claims just a few days before the synagogue attack. The Australian newspaper ran a strong front page, which was a statement from the office of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, criticising Australia's positioning and suggesting that Australia had lost touch with Israel as a traditional ally. Then we have the synagogue attack in the early hours of Friday morning. Albanese, as David points out, calls into Melbourne radio at 830 and says very strongly, very swiftly this is an anti-Semitic attack. There are some callers on the radio program who say, we don't even know the motive yet. How can you call it anti-Semitism? And the Prime Minister clearly says to RAF Epstein that any attack on any place of worship is a hate crime against that group of people. And he was he was he was strong on that. So that counters the claims from the coalition that he wasn't strong quickly. Then overnight on Friday at midnight on on Saturday, I guess the Israeli prime minister goes one step further and he does a tweet directly from his mouth rather than from his office, where he says that the burning of the Adas Israel Synagogue in Melbourne is an abhorrent act of anti-Semitism. And unfortunately, it's impossible to separate this reprehensible act from the extreme anti-Israel position of the labor government in Australia, including the scandalous decision to support the UN resolution calling on Israel to, quote, bring an end to unlawful occupation. Then he makes the contentious claim, which has been criticised even by our own anti-Semitism envoy, that anti-Israel sentiment is anti-Semitism. There is no fair criticism of Israel. So there's this confluence of events and months of criticism about the Prime Minister's strength of resolve on this issue. He's then in Perth on Saturday. He plays tennis on the weekend. The opposition makes a whole set of demands on what he needs to do to crack down on anti-Semitism, and it takes him till about Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, particularly in a press conference in the Sydney Holocaust Museum on Wednesday to look like he's really feeling the weight of the issue.

I unequivocally condemn these shameful acts of violence aimed at the Jewish community. They are acts which are aimed at promoting fear in the community and that, by any definition, is what terrorism is about. And we need and to.

Match the moment in terms of his rhetoric, body language and just placing the issue at the forefront of his mind and agenda.

David, he did eventually visit the synagogue on Tuesday this week, and it was a bit of a shemozzle, wasn't it? It was a bit of a it was chaotic scenes.

It looked like chaos, I guess, because that's what happens often with a media scrum. And there were people there who were heckling him.

Will you stay for tennis? Guys! Push back. Keep going. Mr. Prime Minister condemned calls for intifada against Jews.

But there's a debate about how those, you know, media events unfold. They often look like chaos because of the scrum. He went into the synagogue, spoke to the Adas Israel Congregation members. And I think a really important thing that our colleague Chip Le Grand pointed out on a front page story in The Age this week. After that, he then went to the home of Michael Spiegelman, one of the congregation members, and spoke privately to congregation members for some time. I think about an hour. So it wasn't just about what the cameras saw. And I think it's a bit tiresome when political journos talk about optics all the time. But let's face it, the optics weren't good, and some of the challenge of the week for Anthony Albanese has been managing The symbolism of the job, because I don't think it's possible to make a rational, coherent criticism that he's soft on anti-Semitism. When you look at rationally what the government has done, but it's about these symbolic aspects of the job that are challenging at the moment.

My sort of feeling, Paul, is that this this ties in very neatly for the opposition into the broader narrative of Albanese being weak, perhaps a little bit out of his depth, having poor judgment, not being able to fully handle or step up to a sort of crisis like this.

I agree, and I think the symbolism was made clear on Wednesday when the Prime Minister wanted his day to be dominated by a big rally style speech in Brisbane, in the seat of the Greens MP max Chandler-mather, who he despises, and the feeling is mutual. Talking about a new childcare policy which will give a guarantee three days of childcare subsidy to almost all parents. Labour sees this as a big plank of its re-election pitch. The Prime Minister is on solid ground and comfortable and delivers with vigour. These kind of services policies, these kind of tangible cost of living things that Labour is traditionally strong on. But the days national media was dominated by what he did a few hours later when he was at the Sydney synagogue, giving a quite emotional press conference addressing one of these issues that draws in social attitudes, national character, some of the federal government issues that are less about service delivery and childcare and HECS and transport and these kinds of things where the Prime Minister is more comfortable but requires a kind of big picture national leadership and kind of capturing the social zeitgeist. These kinds of moments where the coalition have framed the Prime Minister to be unable to. To match up to.

David, I want to get your take on that because, I mean, it's open to debate how much an average voter is attention they're going to be paying to the tweets of Benjamin Netanyahu or what votes Australia is taking at the United Nations, and whether or not we can actually draw a causative link between what we're doing at a diplomatic level on Israel and a horrible, violent terrorist attack against the synagogue in Melbourne. And then we had attacks in Sydney, too. What are the political ramifications of all this for Albanese? If we really step back and realize that most people won't be taking notice of the minutiae of it?

I think it's an incredibly challenging time for Anthony Albanese, because we know and the Resolve political monitor that we publish, that the labor primary vote is down and Anthony Albanese is standing personally in the polls, is also down. And Peter Dutton, as the alternative prime minister, has been gaining ground. So that's the backdrop. And so looking like the. Authority figure looking like you're in charge and you're in control is fundamental to the task of being prime minister. And that's where this narrative about anti-Semitism is so damaging to Anthony Albanese. And I mean, let's face it, where's that narrative coming from? It's coming from the coalition. It's also coming from the News Corp media, most prominently in terms of running a narrative that is weak. Um, now, you know, blaming the media isn't the way for the government to get out of this. Even though he has made a remark in cabinet about News Corp, the way out of it is to get on top of these issues and to make sure you manage the symbolic aspect of the job, you manage the optics and that you're in command and in control and that's, you know, just incredibly challenging. I think that, you know, the coalition attack line has really moved on to be that. Not just that Albanese is weak on this, but that the government has enabled these anti-Semitic attacks. And that's a quite an outtheir claim, I think.

Yeah. And as you say, there's not actually any sort of firm evidence for that claim. By contrast, the opposition and Peter Dutton in particular is really positioning himself as a strongman. So, you know, a strongman on immigration, a strongman on anti-Semitism. He went to the synagogue sooner than Albanese did to pay his respects. He's also made this sort of announcement this week, if you can call it that. He went on Sky news and said that if he becomes prime minister, he will he will abolish the Aboriginal flag as a backdrop for prime ministerial press conferences and so forth, which has sort of become the convention under Albanese.

If we're asking people to to identify with different flags, no other country does that, and we are dividing our country unnecessarily. Now, we should have respect for the.

Now, I don't want to spend too much time on this, because my feeling is that it's a little bit of a distraction, and we should be focusing on more on the policy aspects of what the opposition is putting forward. But what did you make of this, Paul?

I think there's been a lot of commentary since that. It's a deliberate distraction from where they're going next. On their highly anticipated and likely to be very contentious nuclear policy costings, which we expect on Friday. I had this conversation, I think, with you, David, on Wednesday, about whether these distractions are deliberate to the extent that they are literally pre-planned, as in, there's a question planted by a friendly journalist, like the Sky news political commentator Peta Credlin, who asked the question that drew this answer out from Dutton. My sense is that these things are not quite so sophisticated. He likes to do Sky news interviews and TV interviews because he's talking to his base. Obviously there are not that many viewers on Sky news, but it's a bit of red meat that keeps keeps that group, please. And it's also comfortable territory for him to send messages out. I think we may read too much into these kinds of moments. And his strategy, I think he might have just been giving an answer that was honest, and that aligns with everything we know about his stance on these issues. This is someone who campaigned fiercely against the voice to Parliament when it looked like a vast majority of Australians were supporting it. This is someone who didn't go to the apology to Indigenous Australians and subsequently apologised to that. Um, this is someone who occupies a political territory in Queensland in the early part of his career, where he was at points, kind of in the same contest as Pauline Hanson. So we know where Dutton sits on these issues. The voice vote proved that a lot of other Australians sit in the same position. Um, and I'm not I'm not quite sure if it's if we can call it a it was a useful way to occupy the airwaves when maybe we might have been talking about nuclear costings this week, but I'm not sure it's that sophisticated.

I think he was playing to the base. I don't think it gains him any ground where he really needs to gain ground. And most importantly, he stopped talking about household budgets and the cost of living and that is what's going to decide the election. Anthony Albanese was talking about household budgets with childcare. There was an attempt by the government to get back onto those bread and butter issues for voters. But there's been no similar attempt by Peter Dutton. And I think he was distracted in a way that he didn't need to be.

We haven't had a chance to talk about that childcare policy, which is actually pretty significant. The government has promised up to three days a week with childcare subsidies. They've scrapped the activity test. So, you know, the primary carer won't actually have to be working to avail themselves of childcare subsidies. It's going to cost the taxpayer $427 million over five years. And it's, you know, it's pretty it's pretty generous because families earning up to $530,000 a year as a family, which is a lot of money. Will be able to access it. David, do you think it's a winner of a policy?

Yes, I do, because I think it's another step towards universal childcare and it's another step towards helping families with the cost of raising children. There will be some debate about the idea that there's no longer an activity test. For instance, for a mother who's got a show that, you know, she needs to go back to work in order to get the childcare, they get a minimum of three days, regardless of any activity test, but they are acting on a recommendation from the Productivity Commission, saying that this will increase workforce participation. And it's good for the economy. So they've got solid economic advice that there is an economic gain for the entire country from doing this policy. It does come at a budget cost. The government kind of lost a bit of traction here this week, because some people would not have even noticed this move this week, but it's another step towards a bigger, bolder childcare policy next year, closer to the election when we will see. Anthony Albanese talk about this ambition to have universal childcare, to be helping parents with children.

Paul and David, thank you so much for coming in. David, we will see you next week. Paul. I guess we'll see you next year.

Thanks, Jackie. Cheers.

Today's episode of Inside Politics was produced by Kai Wong with technical assistance from Debbie Harrington and Belen Sanchez. Our executive producer is Tammy Mills. Our head of audio is Tom McKendrick. Inside politics is a production of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. If you enjoy the show and you want more of our journalism, subscribe to our newspapers today. It's the best way to support what we do. Search the age or Smh.com.au forward slash. Subscribe. I'm Jacqueline Maley, this is inside politics. Thank you for listening.