Once untouchable, Anthony Albanese ends the years under siege
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“The only thing I’m focused on is to keep working,” Albanese said in Canberra. He made no suggestions about alternative federal or state investigations into anti-Semitism or how authorities failed to stop the attack.
The Prime Minister used the same press conference to highlight new videos that more closely tied the Bondi killers to the Islamic State.
“This has been around for a long period of time,” he said, pointing out that Islamic extremism was not new and subtly attempting to de-link the massacre from the antisemitism debate.
Asked whether Islamic extremism was the country’s biggest security threat as reports emerged about the religious motivations of the men attending Bondi, Alban placed jihadists alongside other bad actors.
“I want to deal with all the threats, whether it’s extremist perversions of Islam leading to support for the ideology that ISIS promotes, whether it’s the issue of sovereign citizens killing the police… I’m worried about neo-Nazis,” he said.
Albanese is right when he says there are countless bad actors in the world. But one MP said the prime minister should speak in black and white about the scourge of fundamentalism, at least from Monday.
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The Prime Minister will never comply with demands from right-wingers, some of whom are openly bigoted against Muslims, about how he should talk about extremists on the fringes of the Muslim community. But some MPs in his wing believe he has sometimes refrained from taking value-based stances on antisemitism for fear of angering Muslim voters in Labor seats, a claim the prime minister would reject.
Albanese showed regret on Thursday over Labor’s response to rising bigotry against Jews. One of the things that frustrated Jewish leaders was their view that Albanians tended to create false equivalences.
In response to a question about antisemitism on Friday, he said: “Some of this is not new. James Saleam, [white nationalist organisation] National Action [founder]Tried to kill Eddie Funde of the African National Congress. As a student, I ran against that vile fascist at the University of Sydney in 1983. This was a very long period of time. “The problems have increased and we need to take action against them all,” he said.
This week the government took major steps against hate preachers that no Coalition government has taken before. But if his mission over the summer is to prove that he is a statesman capable of holding the country together, diversion, false equivalence and delay will not get him far.
Bondi terror attack given more coverage
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