Australia, New Zealand, and Israel: Elections Have (Good and Bad) Consequences                           

This past week has shown once again that elections have consequences—not least in the Antipodes, and not least for Jews and for Israel.

Take New Zealand, whose trendy progressive government under Jacinda Ardern came to an end when she resigned in January 2023. In the October 2023 general election, her Labor Party suffered the widest defeat of a sitting government in several decades: there was a 23 point swing against Labor.

Lo and behold, the new National Party government announced in February of this year that it was designating Hamas in its entirety as a terrorist organization, dispensing with the fiction that there is a Hamas “political wing” uninvolved in terrorism Then this week it designated Hezbollah in its entirety as a terrorist organization, again junking the ridiculous notion of a “political wing.” New Zealand also designated the Houthis as a terrorist organization this week.

 But Australia has moved in the other direction, increasingly anti-Israel since the Labor Party won the 2022 general election. The previous (conservative) government had been a reliable friend of Israel, and Australia’s votes in the United Nations more and more frequently sided with the United States on Israel-related matters. Those days are gone.

This past week, that Labor government refused to allow former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked to enter Austraia. She was to attend a conference sponsored by AIJAC, the Australia/Israel Jewish Affairs Council, which is Australia’s AIPAC. This was apparently just too dangerous for the current government in Canberra to permit; it said she might “incite discord.” So much for freedom of speech; so much for allowing Australians to hear a defense of Israel from an official of its previous multi-party, centrist government. To what other democratic country has this approach been applied? It seems the answer is none; this is just one piece of the Albanese government’s hostility to Israel and its catering to anti-Israel extremist opinion.

The other pieces have been evident since Albanese came to power. After the Hamas attacks, President Biden was just one of the many world leaders (including the French president and UK prime minister) who visited Israel in a show of solidarity. Prime Minister Albanese visited Washington in October 2023, but rejected suggestions that he stop in Israel on the way. Nor has he been there since.

There’s more. For more than 20 years Australia had voted against or abstained on the perennial U.N. resolution claiming that the Palestinian Authority had sovereignty over natural resources in the West Bank and Gaza. Not any more: Australia supported that resolution in the General Assembly’s Second Committee in November 2024. This resolution comes under the UN’s Sustainable Development goals. Israel is the only country that the UN condemned under this agenda – ever.

What Australia now supports is described by the UN this way:

By its terms, the Assembly would demand that Israel, the occupying Power, cease the exploitation, damage, cause of loss or depletion and endangerment of the natural resources in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan.

Further to the draft, it would recognize the right of the Palestinian people to claim restitution as a result of any exploitation, damage, loss or depletion or endangerment of their natural resources resulting from illegal measures taken by Israel, the occupying Power, and Israeli settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem….

Again, there's more: In 2018, Australia under Prime Minister Scott Morrison recognized West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. In 2022, Prime Minister Albanese reversed that and started using “Occupied Palestinian Territories” to refer to the West Bank, Gaza—and of course Jerusalem.

Nor did any of that change after October 7, 2023. As AIJAC put it this month, “Since the October 7 atrocities led to an Israel-Hamas war, at almost every opportunity, the Government seems to have chosen to strain, instead of consolidate, our relationship with Israel.” The AIJAC statement continued:

One festering sore for Jewish communities worldwide is the appalling double standards the UN and its agencies apply to Israel. Israel is generally censured there as often as all other countries combined, with permanent agenda items in UN bodies devoted to condemning Israel. UN double standards regarding the Jewish state are seen as antisemitism playing out on the international stage.

For Australian Jews, there was a measure of pride that our country was not part of this farce. Alas, no more. Australia’s UN voting record has regressed to abstentions or even affirmatives when there should be noes….

We voted in May for a resolution supporting recognition of a still non-existent Palestinian state – breaking not only with the US, which opposed the resolution, but also Canada, the UK and Germany, which abstained. The motion also gave “Palestine” greater powers in the UN.

The statement concluded with these words: “The effect of the Government’s shift in Middle East policies has been to increase the isolation felt by Australia’s Jewish community, suffering its worst-ever wave of antisemitism. Indeed, it may even have inadvertently contributed to the intensity of the unprecedented antisemitic wave afflicting Australia over the past year.”

Australia has “evolved.” Once one of the few countries that joined the United States, Canada, and occasionally a European nation in solidarity with Israel, it has now joined the jackals at the U.N. For the Albanese government, this is either a cynical domestic political move or it is an ideological commitment that places solidarity with the Left over solidarity with a fellow democracy fighting for its life against Iran and against three terrorist groups, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. Either way it is a sad turn for a country that used to know better.

Ayelet Shaked’s reaction to the despicable, cowardly decision to refuse her permission to visit Australia was to promise that she would  visit “in better days.” Friends of Australia must hope they come soon.