Published: 27 April 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
I know this seems counter-intuitive in an election season replete with bagel-barrelling in the Macnamara and Wentworth electorates and Labor’s removal of Melissa Parke as candidate for Curtin in WA.
In Macnamara, formerly Melbourne Ports, Labor candidate Josh Burns scored a publicity coup by announcing a Shorten government would cough up for a feasibility study to advance long-standing, if little-publicised, negotiations to move Mt Scopus College from Burwood to the independent Jewish Republic of Caulfield as part of a three-piece manoeuvre involving the redevelopment of Caulfield Hospital and expansion of Deakin University.
Macnamara also hosted a much-publicised town hall debate in which the Liberals’ (er …) high-profile candidate Kate Ashmor insisted she was more Jewish than the Scopus-educated Burns because, unlike him, she had a mezuzah on her campaign office.
A blue-and-white campaign poster proclaiming “the Liberal Party stands strong with Israel” occupies roughly half the shopfront at the Carlisle Street Glick’s. (An uninformed tourist might reasonably think Ashmor is running on Bibi’s list rather than Scott Morrison’s.)
As nature abhors a vacuum, the 2019 Macnamara contest was destined to be a schvitzer after the retirement of Michael Danby, the veteran MP who virtually wrote the playbook for heavy-handed Zionist campaigning of the kind Ashmor is now mimicking.
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Indeed, she was referencing it so often that at one point during the now infamous mezuzah-gate debate, Burns was moved to point out Danby was, in fact, in Labor’s column. Whatever the political implications of the explicitly pro-Israel pitch, an incumbent running on their record boasts more moral authority than a wanna-be appealing to base prejudice.
True, Danby attracted Jewish voters not ordinarily inclined to Labor: I know some of them. But, in last year’s Victorian election these same voters came perilously close to evicting another of the community’s political golden boys, David Southwick, from his Caulfield seat.
In other words, tribal loyalty cannot hold back the electoral tide. Even the community’s foremost golden boy, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, must spend big to shore up his vote in blue-ribbon Kooyong.
The crudest and least effective Jewish vote-grab is the sort that contradicts a party’s values or platform.
A purist – say, me – wonders if Labor conspicuously helping a one-percenter’s institution such as Scopus entrench itself as the communal school of choice undermines the party’s broader campaign message against economic inequality.
I understand the indignation around Ashmor’s unearthed assertion that private schools were “far superior” to private schools. But, championing private education is embedded in the Liberals’ DNA. However glib Ashmor’s expression – her alma mater Caulfield Grammar evidently failed to instil noblesse oblige – the sentiment was basically on message.
Still, the Libs set the high-water mark in pandering to Jewish voters in the lead-up to last year’s Wentworth by-election with Morrison’s Trump-inspired thought bubble of shifting the Australian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Apart from anything else, the announcement departed so starkly from Australia’s bipartisan position on the Middle East that it has damaged the Coalition’s efforts to project foreign policy gravitas.
And, Coalition strategists might have pointed out that Trump’s Jerusalem move was more likely a gesture to his evangelical base than a pitch to Jewish voters, who, in last year’s mid-terms, still voted roughly 79 per cent Democrat, up slightly from 2014 figures, according to exit-polling analysis.
We can extrapolate that Wentworth’s Jews were likewise unimpressed, preferring the small “l” independent Kerryn Phelps, who married a nice Jewish girl, became one herself and most importantly, is a doctor.
Second-time Liberal candidate for Wentworth and former ambassador to Israel Dave Sharma must again campaign with the Jerusalem stunt hanging over him.
While Jewish votes are hard to buy, they can be more easily lost. Even my die-hard lefty friends in the UK say they won’t vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, which is fracturing from anti-Semitism controversies. I suspect the radically pro-Palestinian Melissa Parke similarly had the potential to diminish Labor’s standing with Jewish voters.
It doesn’t follow that in prevailing upon her to withdraw, Labor has caved in to the “Jewish lobby”. Parke’s anti-Israel stance is as discordant with Labor’s Middle East policy as was Morrison’s Jerusalem play with the Liberals’ established position.
Whatever lip service Parke pays to the two-state solution, her championing of Palestinian refugees’ “right of return” suggests she doesn’t see a conflict between two peoples with equally compelling aspirations for self-determination. Personally, I feel her airing of the case of a pregnant Palestinian refugee reportedly ordered at a checkpoint in Gaza to drink bleach indicates animus towards Israel, whatever the veracity of that particular claim.
We could argue this last point endlessly, but as Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said after the withdrawal of Parke as a candidate, the Israel-Palestine stoush is a risky “distraction” during a federal election campaign. To the relief of all but Israel-Palestine obsessives, Jerusalem and Gaza are a long way from Wentworth and Macnamara, let alone from Curtin.
Main photo: Kate Ashmor speaks at the candidates debate for Macnamara in Melbourne, with Josh Burns (left) and Steph Hodgins-May (Greens) - Youtube
