Scott Morrison Doesn’t Seem to Know What Socialism Is

You’re reading VICE Australia’s weekly lead-in to the federal election. Progressive or conservative, they’ve all got a reason to play the game – shouldn’t you know enough to talk about it at the pub?

Election season is here and left is right while right is extreme. Anthony Albanese appears determined to win at all costs, however far adrift from his base that may take him. As a result, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has struggled to put space between himself and his opponent. With his back against the wall now, he’s growing frustrated.

It was when Morrison, in the throes of a debate on national security on Friday, tried to paint Albanese as some sort of raging socialist borne of the most hard-line factions of the Australian left that the Prime Minister revealed that he’s running on fumes. He turned to a familiar refrain: accusing the opposition leader of being entrenched in the “socialist left” of the Labor Party; of being anti-Israel, and of being “the most leftwing-leaning Labor leader since Gough Whitlam”, the godfather of Medicare.

“I believe not only is Anthony Albanese not the right leader for this country, because I don’t think he has the strength on national security that I have demonstrated and my government has demonstrated,” Morrison said on Friday.

“The other part that worries me about Anthony Albanese when it comes to national security is that he has or has come from the socialist left of the Labor party – he has always had sympathies with those policies, which have been very hostile.”

Only, he hasn’t. Albanese has a longstanding track record of mounting relentless attacks in the face of calls for boycotts of Israel. In July last year, for better or for worse, he slammed a Labor motion shilled by former NSW premier Bob Carr calling for a boycott of Israel over the violence it thrust upon Palestinians.  

“I regard the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign as one that is based upon a racial targeting of a group, in this case Israel, and it is something that I have not supported,” Albanese was reported as saying during a Zoom call hosted by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry last July.

“It seems to me that the more contact that people have with each other, the better. We need more contact, not less contact.”

He made a similar play in 2011 when, soon after Sydney’s Marrickville council – where Albanese grew up – announced that it would move ahead with boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel in the face of ongoing Zionist colonisation, later described by Amnesty International as apartheid, in the West Bank. Even back then he dismissed the move as “unfortunate and misguided”.

On national security, Morrison and Albanese’s recent voting records have fallen into lockstep as well. You only need to cast your mind back 48 hours to get a taste of what’s to come should Albanese win at the federal election in May.

The Coalition tried not once, but twice to try and make Labor look weak on crime and weak on national security this week. And, twice, the opposition voted with the government, each as desperate as the next to win at the other’s game.

The first was the “strengthening character test” bill – viewed by scores of moderate Labor MPs as completely unnecessary – which would see anyone who has committed any number of violent crimes eligible to have their visa cancelled at the drop of a hat.

The next came in the form of a new firearms trafficking bill that will bring with it mandatory sentencing, an issue members of the Labor party have historically opposed. Even still, they backed it in minutes.

The shadow home affairs minister, Kristina Keneally, told The Guardian on Thursday that leadership had decided to support the bill on Thursday morning, describing it as “fairly straightforward” and the party’s position as largely similar as the one held by its caucus back in 2019.

“We can’t govern from opposition – Mr Morrison seemed quite clear in his intent to politicise national security in the context of an election, trying to manufacture a difference with the opposition when, in reality, one does not exist,” Keneally said.

Keneally describes it best. Each passing day, Albanese and Morrison become increasingly difficult to differentiate. They’re just becoming shadows of each other, converging on the centre right, with a pitch to be less hateable to a group of voters who probably don’t like either of them. 

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