Extract from ABC News
Analysis
Australian politics was once again swept up in world affairs this week.
Many Australians may well remain consumed by their increasing struggles with the cost of living, and apprehensive about the growing prospect of yet another interest rate rise in just over a week's time.
The dust has not yet settled on the aftermath of the referendum.
But it is international developments that are now dominating our daily domestic politics — from our relationships with the US and China to the Middle East. Some reflect better on our political leaders than others.
There would have been a time not very long ago when the major foreign policy issue was the state of our relationship with China, and the language that was being used about it would have been obsessively combed over by all the aficionados, and challenged by the opposition.
The accumulation of individual wins, or at least corrections, to the China relationship in the past 18 months have changed that: backdowns from our biggest trading partner on barley and wine; the release of journalist Cheng Lei.
In a week's time, the prime minister will travel to China and meet with President Xi Jinping — a far cry from the days when government ministers couldn't get their counterparts to return their calls.
And it will be on the back of a week spent in Washington urging the Congress on to pass legislation in support of the AUKUS submarine program which is clearly driven by concerns about China.
On the AUKUS deal there has been a generally unquestioning bipartisanship.
But on the question of the Middle East, there is a disturbing lack of bipartisanship which has real world consequences and which seems to potentially point to an ugly new direction in domestic politics.
The carefully chosen words of world leaders
The horrific Hamas attacks into Israel on October 7 shocked the world and, in the eyes of many, set back the Palestinian cause by years.
But the subsequent siege of Gaza by Israel, and the mounting death toll among its civilian population, has changed the content of the day-to-day reporting of the story of this conflict.
The pictures are now more regularly of people being pulled out of the rubble of destroyed buildings in Gaza and the reports are of the carefully chosen words of world leaders urging caution and restraint from Israel.
The complexities of how Israel responds to Hamas in a physical sense, the risks that this conflict escalates around the region, and what the end game would be even if knocking out Hamas was achieved, are one set of questions.
But for Australian political leaders, the issues are how to adjust your rhetoric to the realities of this changing focus of the story, and how mindful you are of the way it is playing out in our own communities.
And we are now seeing a very clear splintering of any bipartisanship on how this unbelievably fraught situation, with all its history, should be discussed in Australia.
Labor ministers have increasingly been acknowledging the distress the images from Gaza are causing to Australian Muslim and Arab communities.
They are at pains to point out this is not about taking sides, or defending Hamas.
The concept of 'competitive grief'
The latest to do so was Industrial Relations Minister Tony Burke, who told ABC radio on Friday morning:
What happened on October the 7th was horrific and was rightly condemned by the Parliament and condemned by me — the condemnation of Hamas. We can't have that condemnation be added to by saying as a result of condemnation, that's somehow weakened if you grieve for anybody else. That's somehow weakened if you do something to acknowledge the Palestinian loss of life.
There's a really immature debate that we often fall into where it says if you acknowledge anything in favour of the Palestinian people or a claim that if in any way you acknowledge that there is a history that began before October 7 that somehow that's making excuses for Hamas.
It's not. It's simply the case that people have a right to be able to grieve when innocent life is lost. The concept of competitive grief, which certainly hasn't driven any of the interviews on this program but has driven some of the media, is something that I don't want to see in Australia. I believe we do have the maturity and we need to have the maturity to have the respect for each other's grief.
Burke's electorate includes a large Middle Eastern community and he endorsed a decision by the local council to fly a Palestinian flag until there was a ceasefire.
"You need to understand," he said, "in my part of Sydney people are watching every day, death. They're watching every day images, sometimes of people they know, often of children.
"If I go through the suburbs across from Belmore, Lakemba, where I live in Punchbowl through to Bankstown, pretty much everybody knows somebody who has lost someone. Until the council made that decision there was nowhere in Australia where those colours were being acknowledged as worthy of grieving."
His remarks were immediately attacked by Jewish groups as "appalling".
Foreign Minister Penny Wong has hardened her language over the past week, calling for a ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza and to pointedly say that the way Israel defends itself matters.
She has also criticised Iran — a key backer of Hamas — for its "destabilising role" in the Middle East and told Iran's foreign minister that in a phone call this week.
Questions of migration
On the other side of politics, the Coalition has continued, and if anything hardened, its rhetoric on this dispute to overwhelmingly side with Israel.
Peter Dutton has questioned the sincerity and force of the prime minister's condemnation of Hamas, and insisted he should go to Israel to demonstrate Australia's support.
But as if the current conflict in the Middle East was not fraught enough, the opposition leader somehow managed to link it this week with border policies and even push back against the idea that refugees from Gaza might be allowed to come here because they may secretly be Hamas fighters.
"I don't believe it's in our country's best interests to be increasing that intake at the moment without certainty around who individuals are and the fact that they're going to be perfect Australian citizens, or as best as we could hope for," Dutton told radio host Ray Hadley.
His comments come at a time when there have already been predictions that, on the back of the ugly divisions the Coalition was happy to stir up over the Voice, it would target migration at the next election.
To do so on the back of a horrific and complex dispute like the one in the Middle East, would set an ominous tone for our political future and almost certainly ensure these age-old tensions were imported to Australia.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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