With a commanding parliamentary position and no credible opposition, Labor has unprecedented room to lead. Instead, caution, foreign policy timidity and deference to powerful lobbies are defining its moment.

In December 2024 I wrote that Anthony Albanese should be replaced as Labor leader and Prime Minister. His wrongheaded decision to kowtow to the Israel lobby and invite Israeli President Issac Herzog to visit Australia confirms that he lacks the acuity and courage to lead the Labor Party. His invitation clearly fostered sharp division in the country. He should be called out for demanding overseas conflicts be kept out of Australia while welcoming and honouring the head of a foreign state accused of war crimes and genocide. 

I included Labor’s “factional assassin”, Defence Minister Richard Marles, and our dissembling Foreign Minister, Penny Wong as well. Marles’ has kept us captive to the floundering AUKUS project and in unnecessary conflict with China. Wong’s handling of foreign affairs has the nation clinging to Trump’s toxic America – and to Israel’s grim determination to “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”. Both of them know that AUKUS, Trump and Israeli warmongering are massively unpopular in Labor ranks. But they persist because they are lackeys for the US military-industrial complex and the Zionist lobby in Australia. They should go too.

My call in 2024 was followed by the luckiest break ever handed to a Labor government. The implosion of the Liberals under the leadership of Peter Dutton at the May 2025 election was a stroke of massive good fortune for Labor. That Tory collapse continues to pay windfall dividends for Labor in power. The rise of uber-conservative Angus Taylor to lead the fractured party could see them smashed completely as a viable opposition – let alone an alternative government. In the stinging words of Malcolm Turnbull, Taylor is “the best qualified idiot” in Canberra. From the underbelly of the Liberal rump we see rogues like Alex Antic emerging into the sunlight and publicly canvassing a coalition deal with Pauline Hanson. On current form the effect on the prime minister will be to follow the reactionaries and move Labor further to the right on immigration policy.

In 2004 I worked briefly with Albo to craft a resolution on justice for Palestine at the ALP National Conference. He won’t remember that, but back then many of us admired the young gun from the NSW Left for his brand of working class politics and his support for social justice at home and abroad. How a term or two in power and life in the Chairman’s Lounge changes people.

Albanese’s political response to the Bondi massacre has been gutless and unprincipled. His horror at the killings was genuine, but everything else has been a product of political calculus and weakness.

In July 2025, when his handpicked Antisemitism Envoy Jillian Segal delivered her awful 13-page ‘report’, the government saw immediately that her recommendations were unsupported by evidence. More than that, they were openly sectarian and unworkable. They were intended as a weapon to manipulate the prime minister and his senior ministers to act against supporters of justice for Palestine.

Back then shrewder heads in the government prevailed. They suggested that Segal could be quietly ignored after accounts of most ‘antisemitic attacks’ turned out to be false or wildly exaggerated. Or, in the case of the Dural caravan bomb scam, just good old criminal bastardly grifting on the zeitgeist of confected antisemitism in mainstream media.

Bondi changed that because, as we know, the tragedy, the savagery and the shame of that attack was instantly weaponised to be used against the Labor government. There were many culprits in that tawdry effort, none worse than then Opposition Leader Sussan Ley and her probable eventual replacement, the always opportunistic Josh Frydenberg. But their grubby and vicious politics can’t excuse Albo’s response. He caved in to an orchestrated campaign for a Royal Commission on ‘antisemitism’ and he then accepted Segal’s odious recommendations in full. The real issue – ASIO’s vetting performance and the NSW police response to the attacks – was relegated to a sideshow inquiry.

None of us can imagine Whitlam or Keating caving in to the Israel lobby the way Albo has. After a bumbling and near-incoherent performance on the ABC’s _7.30_ program in July last year, Jillian Segal had retreated to her den. There she had to fend off allegations that she was associated with the extreme right Advance Australia outfit, that she had failed to condemn a Nazi rally and allegations that her real aim is to silence the 300,000 voices who took the March for Humanity across the Sydney Harbour Bridge on 3 August 2025. The Segal agenda was about sowing mayhem in the ranks of Palestine supporters and leveraging state power to curb legitimate outrage over the genocide in Gaza.

Labor rank and file members are asking who is leading the good fight for a decent society and a just foreign policy. For what does Labor now stand? The pragmatists and sycophants in the party say the Prime Minister will only ‘pick fights’ where he needs to. They want the Labor party to behave like a Liberal-lite government to keep our own people parked on the Treasury benches. That means more pressure on the social safety net; to Medicare, the NDIS and aged care services. It also means ever-spiralling defence spending to pay for the monumental $368 billion waste of AUKUS. Nuts to that.

Under Albanese, Labor is open and vulnerable to the rent-seeking sectional interests who push every day to manipulate public policy. Groups like the well-funded Israel lobby, Advance Australia, the Australian Christian Lobby, the Murdoch press, the gambling lobby, the mining lobby and the big four banks. All of them wield undue influence over policy and politics in Canberra.

We know their game and what they want. We are part of a movement that historically resists that world view and the perversion of the public interest. In 1964, when nervous Democrats urged then US President Johnson to drop his commitment to the Civil Rights Act, LBJ famously retorted: “What the hell is the Presidency for?” Well may we ask the same here and now in Australia.

With an unassailable position in the parliament, no viable or coherent opposition and a wealth of talent in Labor ranks, its time to elevate Albo to emeritus status. He deserves to be remembered well for what he achieved in the Labor movement before he became prime minister. But we urgently need to get back to the serious business of providing leadership to the country. For that we require a strong and assured administration that refuses to genuflect to the power plays of well-resourced and self-interested lobbies.

Barring a massive corruption scandal or a world war, Labor can look to plan government for the next five years. Social and economic inequality is the biggest unrecognised issue in Australia. Justice for First Nations people remains neglected. We are gently sliding towards the massive inequality and internal conflict that besets the US. The ‘drill baby, drill’ neo-liberal project has already failed. Many Australians know their life chances are being shackled by greed and unfairness. People also want an end to the misery of militarism overseas.

The question becomes: what is Labor doing to progress Australia? Big parliamentary majority notwithstanding, it’s time for Labor to look to the next chapter in advancing social justice, national wellbeing and respected international citizenship.