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As I wrote recently, Australian PM Anthony Albanese just can’t get a winner. Nothing he does is working for him. Tax cuts, wage rises, handouts and all the traditional pork-barreling stuff is falling into open pockets and on closed ears.
Mostly because of his own ham-fisted political stupidity. Albo just keeps throwing his weight behind the worst causes. Whether it’s bolting out the gate with a racially divisive referendum nobody had talked about during the election campaign, or trying to pander to the worst anti-Semitic prejudices of Muslims and the left.
The latter has belted him right in the face this week, courtesy of a formerly obscure Muslim neophyte senator almost no one had heard of and even fewer voted for. Fatima Payman was the closest Australia has to a list MP, elected on a Labor party Senate ticket, with less than 1200 votes.
But, as Muslims in the West will, Payman has leveraged negligible numbers into grossly outsized influence.
Anthony Albanese heads into the parliamentary winter break with the government’s cost of living narrative completely evaporated by Fatima Payman’s dramatic resignation and an image of party in disarray.
The damage from this indulgent outbreak of identity politics can’t be underestimated.
Nothing has gone to script for Albanese this week. Nor last week, nor the previous parliamentary sitting period. And once again, it has been a failure of political management that has overshadowed its policy agenda.
The Australian
But if the defection is diabolical for the Labor Party, it’s an even grimmer portent for Australian politics at large. It signals, loud and clear, that the same aggressive Muslim politicking that has swept Britain, where Muslim enclaves-elected councillors are bellowing “Allahu Ackbar!” on the victory podium.
Fatima Payman’s resignation from the Labor Party opens a new chapter in Australian political history and contains a far more potent threat to Anthony Albanese than just the loss of one vote in the Senate.
It could also be the dawn of a new era in Australia of candidates forming a party based on faith, with the sole purpose of appealing to those of that faith.
With the chilling words of “stay tuned”, the renegade WA senator has put the Prime Minister and his government on notice of the likelihood of her providing the foundation stone for a new Muslim political movement based around a minor party or closely orchestrated independents […] she can now create a Muslim party targeted against Labor MPs.
The Australian
Not to mention Australia. Payman has the backing of shadowy group, The Muslim Vote, which appears to be linked to a British group of the same name, founded by a former leader of the UK chapter of widely banned jihadi terror-supporting group, Hizb ut-Tahrir. A Hizb ut-Tahrir-linked cleric, who publicly declared his “elation” over October 7, is involved with The Muslim Vote in Australia.
The Muslim Vote claims that it is “not a religious campaign but a political one”. Which obscures the fact that, in Islam, there is no functional difference between the two. Unlike Christianity, Islam has no tenet of separation of church and state. Quite the opposite: under orthodox Islamic teaching, “man’s laws” are entirely subordinate to Allah’s.
The seismic fault Labor have helped open in Australia cannot be overestimated.
All because Labor, even more than the rest of the political class, is too self-indulgently determined to put its own lunatic ideological obsessions ahead of the national interest.
Payman’s defection has exposed the internal decay at the heart of the party and its industrial wing.
Instead of moving more toward the centre, it has allowed and even encouraged a preselection process that promotes identity politics and embraces a woke-based lens through which to view the remodelling of the representative wing.
As Labor’s own 2019 election post-mortem concluded, Labor has assiduously alienated “vulnerable workers living in outer-metropolitan, regional and rural Australia”. These are voters who are struggling through a politically induced cost-of-living crisis.
“Indeed, they are often resentful of the attention progressive political parties give at their expense to minority groups and to what is nowadays called identity politics.”
The Australian
Yet, pandering to minority groups has been Albanese’s main political compass, even more than overseas travel. His first announcement the morning after the election was the deeply unpopular, racially divisive Voice referendum. Albanese has been weak and vacillating in the face of a wave of anti-Semitism unleashed after October 7.
And even weaker in the face of the aggressively-grooming rainbow lobby. Working-class parents, hearing their children come home from school parroting what woke teachers told them – girls can have penises, how to have anal sex, Australia is “genocidal” – are furious. So are Christian voters, including many staunchly Christian first-generation migrants (traditionally Labor voters).
Albanese is not just damaging Labor’s “brand”, he’s wrecking the country.
And he’s too thick to even comprehend what he’s done.
