“As I write this, Israeli airstrikes continue to rain down on a city reduced to rubble, on people—a million children—huddled in tents”. Writing as genocide unfolds in Gaza and his newborn Arab-Aboriginal child laughs in his arms, former Greens candidate Omar Sakr dissects Labor’s electoral “super mandate” built on a historically low 34.6% primary vote and coordinated attacks on the Greens. Sakr calls for the Greens to abandon our role as “Labor’s colostomy bag”, positioning Labor as an ideological enemy on par with the LNP.
As I write this, the UN warns that 14,000 babies will soon starve to death if Israel continues its now 70-day long blockade on aid to Gaza. These babies would join the several thousand already murdered by the apartheid state, with the vigorous assistance of the West in arms, funds, political cover at the UN and at the ICC—the latter has been sanctioned by the US—as well as grossly biased media coverage and a fascistic crackdown on protestors and free speech.
As I write this, the State Library of Queensland has cancelled the $15K black&write! prize hours before it was due to be awarded to Indigenous author KA Ren Wyld, thanks to an ongoing harassment campaign from Zionists and the Murdoch press targeting artists and cultural workers who advocate against genocide.
As I write this, I see a video on my feed of a dead Palestinian toddler, covered in blood and my wife brings over my Arab-Aboriginal newborn, who looks so much like the babies I keep seeing wounded, amputated, starving, screaming, or ultimately silenced in death. My baby giggles. He is so alive the pain and joy of it is indescribable. Every inch of love I feel for him—and these inches together reach into heaven such is their measureless length and depth—connects me in turn to the magnitude of loss I know my kin in Lebanon and Palestine, Syria and Yemen, are undoubtedly feeling.
I’ve been asked to write about the federal election which just passed, and in which I ran as the Greens candidate for the seat of Blaxland, gaining 7.9% of the vote as counted so far (85%) for the House of Reps, and almost doubling the senate vote to 12%. The seat was retained by Labor MP Jason Clare, with a negative swing against him of -5.5%. Nationally, the Labor government was re-elected in a landslide victory, largely due to the extreme ineptitude of Peter Dutton, a man who provokes only fear and lacked even a single credible policy to run on; this has always been true, yet polls were still predicting a close election for most of the campaign.
A key difference in this election was the extraordinarily coordinated campaign by the establishment, from Labor to the LNP and fringe far-right parties, to try to lock out the Greens party. Zionist Labor party members openly worked alongside conservatives and far-right groups, putting $15m into a “Put the Greens Last” campaign. They were clear in their intentions and their focus, even admitting to putting the majority of their funds into anti-Greens ads instead of anti-Labor ads. From a political perspective, this makes no sense whatsoever and quite obviously led to the worst outcome for the Liberal party in electoral history, with party leader Peter Dutton losing his own seat and Labor taking winning 94 seats. With the Greens preferences going to Labor, and Liberal preferences as well as the far-right Libertarian and so-called “anti-establishment” fringe parties also preferencing the sitting government, there was literally no other outcome possible except a supersized Labor majority.
There are some who argue that official preferences have little impact, but if this were true, the system wouldn’t exist. We know that anywhere from 20-50% of LNP voters follow official how-to-vote cards (depending on how much resources they put into each seat) while 75% of Greens voters follow their party’s preferences. There are few if any seats where these numbers wouldn’t change the result, so we must be clear what it means that the LNP effectively fell on their own sword to prevent the most likely outcome of the tight election polls had been predicting: a minority Labor government that has to share power with the Greens. In an article in Haaretz about the result, various Australian Zionists commented on their determination to ensure precisely this outcome, one even saying they were prepared to leave the country if the progressive Greens shared power with Labor.
We call the ALP and LNP the “duopoly” for a reason, and more than ever, they move in concert to protect the interests of their corporate donors and that of the American-Zionist genocide. The concentration of media and political power in the hands of the few has led to this deeply alarming moment, all of it determinedly on the side of an apartheid state that’s killed hundreds of thousands and is starving civilians, including children and babies to death. Numerous media analyses have been done from Australia, to America, to the UK, which show a marked bias in presenting Israeli views over Palestinian, with an emotional register provided for the former that is almost always denied the latter.
In light of this, the fact that the Greens vote stayed steady at 12% (0.0% swing) is remarkable. Three seats were lost in the lower House, but we retained 11 senate seats and if Labor wants to pass any bills, they will in all likelihood have to negotiate with the Greens or else continue to prove their consistent alignment with the LNP marks them as a right-wing party, divorced from their own base and party platform. One of the first actions of the new Labor supermajority—approving Woodside’s 45 year extension of the giant North West Shelf plant—conclusively proved their conservative credentials. They achieved this gross betrayal of our future even faster than Dutton had promised to, in less than 30 days. If the Greens want to be anything more than Labor’s colostomy bag taking whatever shit they throw our way, if we want to be a serious national party, than we must recognise that the Labor party is an ideological and political enemy easily on par with the LNP and position ourselves as the credible progressive alternative. In short, we should no longer campaign for the balance of power but for power itself.
Australian Federal Election Progressive Totals from Poll Bludger
The ALP’s primary vote rose by a meagre 2 points to 34.6%—this is what’s being described by our grovelling media as a “super mandate” that is both a rejection of the LNP and of the Greens. Objectively, that is ridiculous, and most seats were won on preferences alone. Nor is this the only confected political narrative to emerge from the election that needs to be corrected or exposed. If we had a functioning cohort of journalists, I wouldn’t need to do this, but here we are.
From “this isn’t about Palestine” to “this election proves we’re right about Palestine”
Throughout the genocide of Palestine and the federal election campaign, the Albanese government was at pains to dodge, deflect, dismiss or otherwise ignore the daily massacres of civilians and children carried out by their “friend”, Israel. They made it clear that this was an election about the cost-of-living crisis, and about “keeping Dutton out”, it was not a referendum on the genocide. This message was hammered into the Australian public, and they were even aided in this by the Greens, who adopted the “keep Dutton out” rhetoric in response to Labor’s scare campaign that only a vote for them could keep Dutton out, effectively leaning on the general public’s ignorance of the preferential system. After the election, however, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and PM Albanese suddenly claimed the result proved their every decision about Gaza was rubber-stamped by the public.
“A clear lesson from the election is that Australians don’t want political leaders to amplify overseas conflict for their own purposes,” Wong said, while Albanese commented that “Australians know that the Australian government is not responsible for what has occurred in the Middle East.” This is precisely the kind of grossly disingenuous rhetoric that Albanese’s hollow, complicit government excels at—putting forward talking points in response to questions nobody is asking, having a fantasy conversation with itself. First, Wong’s grotesque claim both erases the hundreds of thousands of Australians who have been protesting every single week (to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of Australians who have relatives in Palestine and Lebanon and Syria, for whom this “conflict” can neither be “amplified” nor dismissed because we live with it daily), and also insinuates that none of us genuinely care about Arab lives, that it was all a ploy for votes. This perverse cynicism is emblematic of Albanese and Wong’s Labor party: they believe in nothing except votes and so assume the same is true of everyone else.
I’m proud to say the Greens have publicly continued to slam Labor for its criminal refusal to sanction Israel, or end arms trading with the apartheid state as it starves kids to death daily. As for Albanese’s comment, nobody has suggested Australia is responsible for the genocide—what is undeniably clear is that we are complicit in it. We are the sole manufacturers of F-35 jet parts, a war plane Israel uses regularly in its bombardment of Gaza; more than 75 Australian companies are involved in the maintenance of this jet program, with our contributions valued at $5bn annually; in 2024, Albanese signed a military contract that provides $917m to Israeli weapons manufacturer, Elbit System, while our investment in the Israel economy grew 20% to over $1.7 billion annually. In this and many other ways, we are clearly and deeply involved in this genocide, and have numerous material levers we could use to pressure Israel into ceasing its horrific crimes against humanity. Despite this, at every point, the Australian Labor Party has refused to do so.
From “We won’t apply sanctions because we only do that alongside allies” to “We choose our own path”
When pushed on the refusal to sanction Israel for its war crimes, while being happy to sanction Russia for the same, FM Penny Wong said, “When Australia applies sanctions, we coordinate with partners. That’s what makes them effective.” Yet this week, in response to threats from the UK, France, and Canada to impose sanctions on Israel for its 70-day blockade that is starving over a million people to death, Albanese shrugged off the idea of joining our allies. “We follow our own path, and Australia determines our own foreign policy,” he said. It’s beyond clear that there is nothing hold Australia back, this has nothing to do with holding a so-called “centrist” position in an election year, it has nothing to do with what our allies are doing, it has nothing to do with the determination that Israel is committing a genocide; there is no doubt, there is no confusion, there is no ambiguity whatsoever—Australia is deliberately, knowingly complicit in this genocide and it is entirely justified that Albanese has been referred to the International Criminal Court as such.
“A Rejection of Trump Politics”
Despite the LNP being the most avowedly pro-Israel party in Australian politics, their catastrophic electoral result is not taken to be an indication of the public’s rejection of support for Israel, instead it’s been taken as a rejection of “Trump-style” politics, which is embarrassingly strange, because Trump’s politics is extremely Zionist, and what’s more, Labor is fully on board with Trump’s politics. Penny Wong applauded at the fascist felon’s inauguration. Deputy PM Marles was in Washington a week afterwards to give an $800 million handshake, the first of many tribute payments totalling $370 billion that we’ve agreed to give America for the honour of hosting their nuclear submarines all around our continent. Even when Trump put tariffs on us, effectively an economic sanction, PM Albanese’s subservience to Trump only deepened, with the national discourse between him and Dutton being who was willing or able to kiss Trump’s foot with greater devotion.
In fact, just this week, Deputy PM Marles conceded that Australia is seriously considering a key Trump administration demand: to increase our domestic military spending even further. There’s no coherence whatsoever to this claim that either the election or the ALP winning somehow counts rejecting Trump’s politics, which both the LNP and ALP embrace; at a stretch, what is meant by this is that people are afraid of the chaos and fear-drenched spectacle provided by that convicted felon. In short, the desire is for the calm façade of a “reasonable” leader, a polite fiction that enables people to ignore the extreme and catastrophic violence wielded by their governments on other populations around the world. Ethics, morality, and justice have little to do with it. It is into this void that racist ideologies like white supremacy and its offshoot Zionism are flourishing, with the ruling elite doubling down on excusing, arming, funding or ignoring even the most extreme horrors, from Gaza to Yemen, from Sudan to the DR Congo.
As I write this, Israeli airstrikes continue to rain down on a city reduced to rubble, on people—a million children—huddled in tents.
As I write this, Israel orders the closure of Al-Awda hospital, the last functioning hospital in North Gaza.
As I write this, a report by the Social Science Research Network comes out showing that Israel’s detonation of 80,000 tonnes of bombs has a carbon footprint that exceeds the emissions of over 100 countries.
As I write this, the United Nations calls Gaza “the hungriest place on Earth”, saying the entire territory faces catastrophic hunger.
As I write this, Israeli forces killed two more people seeking aid at a distribution point in Rafah.
As I write this, Greta Thunberg and Liam Cunningham are on board the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, a civilian-led effort to break the siege on Gaza and bring humanitarian aid to Palestinians being starved to death. The last attempt saw the ship attacked by drone missiles.
As you read this, know that your government has done nothing whatsoever to halt or hinder this genocide, that your government has in fact aided it, and they are proudly saying that your vote vindicated their decisions.
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Omar Sakr is a queer Arab Muslim poet and novelist, born and raised in Western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish migrants, and a member of The Greens (see his Why I joined The Greens). Some of his published books are These Wild Houses(Cordite, 2017), The Lost Arabs (UQP, 2019), Son of Sin (Affirm Press, 2022).
Featured image: Fairytale by Georgie Dee (2021) CC BY-ND 2.0.