Ever since the bloodcurdling Hamas-led atrocities of October 7, 2023, that shocked the world, the job of governing Australia has come with an added and unwelcome foreign policy burden for Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

This fraught management was not only of foreign policy but also of the wider moral perception of governmental legitimacy.

In the weeks and months following October 7, his government found itself presiding over a surge in antisemitism that has left a deep and lasting mark on the country’s international standing—and, more troublingly, on its sense of itself and, not to mention, Australia’s increasingly nervous Jewish community.

Canberra’s posture on the Israel–Gaza conflict appeared, at times, less like a coherent doctrine than a series of political accommodations to Australia’s various minority groups.

There was an evident sensitivity to domestic electoral geography since a significant Muslim minority, concentrated in Labor-held seats in the western suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, loomed large in the government’s increasingly cynical calculations.

The government’s response to rising antisemitism was marked by a cognitive dissonance between rhetoric and action. Official condemnations were issued but were often perfunctory, as violent incidents accumulated with disquieting regularity. The sense that the government was observing events rather than shaping them became more difficult to ignore as time went on.

That perception hardened in the aftermath of the Bondi Hanukkah attack last December on the sands of Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach, when two Islamist extremists carried out an act of violence that not only left 15 Australians – mainly of the Jewish faith – dead but also shocked the nation to its very core.

For weeks, Albanese appeared politically stunned—slow to meet the seemingly inconsolable grief of Australia’s Jewish community and totally unprepared for the intensity of the anger directed at him.

The estrangement was palpable: in some cases, he was unwelcome even at the funerals of victims.

His initial unwillingness to launch a Royal Commission into the massacre only hardened attitudes against him.

His eventual response—tightening hate-speech laws and moving to proscribe Islamist extremist groups, including Hizb ut-Tahrir, and announcing a Royal Commission—was not without substance.

Even most Jewish community leaders, while initially critical, acknowledged the effort.

But by then, the broader impression had already taken hold: that the government’s actions, however well-intentioned, had come after a long moment of dithering when they might have mattered most.

In politics, timing is not everything, but it is often the only thing that endures or is remembered.

Will the real Sir Kier Starmer please step forward?

One thing that is enduring is how quickly Australia’s PM has become an Antipodean version of his UK counterpart, Sir Kier Starmer.

It is becoming harder to ignore the perception that Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, in seeking political stability, risks projecting something closer to political pliancy—particularly in matters touching on Islamist extremism.

The challenge for any British leader is real: how to uphold security and liberal values while governing a diverse, and at times divided, society. But leadership is tested precisely in these moments of tension, not in their absence.

Starmer’s critics argue that his approach has leant too heavily towards accommodation, especially when confronted with controversial demonstrations, inflammatory rhetoric, or organizations operating in ideological grey zones.

In aiming to avoid alienation, the UK government has appeared reluctant to draw firm lines. That hesitation, fairly or not, is increasingly interpreted – as it is in Australia – as a lack of resolve.

To be clear, Britain’s Muslim communities, also much like Australia’s, are neither monolithic nor inherently radical, and conflating them with extremism is both inaccurate and dangerous.

Yet the refusal to confront extremist currents decisively—whether out of caution or calculation—creates its own risks. It leaves a vacuum in which public confidence erodes and political opponents define the narrative.

What it says about his refusal to address the increasingly loud calls for a response to the so-called ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’ is worthy of a full-blown article of its own.

A prime minister, especially in the increasingly multicultural Anglosphere, cannot afford ambiguity where national cohesion and security are concerned. The question facing Starmer is not whether to balance competing pressures, but whether, in doing so, he has begun to lose his footing altogether.

In respect to politically slippery footing, it seems it’s a race to the bottom with Anthony Albanese fast gaining on the increasingly hapless Starmer.

And it’s the growing threat of home-grown Islamic extremism that is the driver of this mutual lemming-like cliff jump.

The Umma is not happy

For a prime minister more accustomed to the rituals of backroom ALP factional politics and beer-soaked rugby league grand finals than to open dissent, the reception that greeted Anthony Albanese at Sydney’s Lakemba Mosque on Friday, March 20, was a jarring departure.

What was intended as a gesture of respect—an appearance marking the end of Ramadan—became, at moments, a scene of audible hostility.

Seated shoeless alongside his Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, Albanese listened as scattered voices from within the congregation broke through the decorum, heckling and jeering during the proceedings.

The visit, staged for the media before a crowd the prime minister later estimated at 30,000, was meant to signal solidarity with Australia’s Muslim community at a time of heightened tension. Instead, it offered a glimpse of the frictions that have come to define the national mood.

Speaking the following day from South Australia, the PM sought to place the disruption in context. The reception, he said, had been “overwhelmingly positive”, emphasizing that only “a couple of hecklers” had interrupted the event and that they were “dealt with” by members of the community themselves.

To dwell on the incident, he suggested, would be to misread the larger picture. All that was missing was the use of the leftist dog whistle, ‘Islamophobia’.

Yet the dissonance lingered. The prime minister’s subsequent social media post, showing him smiling and shaking hands beneath the greeting “Eid Mubarak”, made no mention of the disruption. It presented a seamless tableau of unity, absent the tensions that had briefly surfaced.

At one point during the visit, as organizers spoke to justify the invitation, an angry voice rang out from the crowd: “Genocide supporters! Get him out of here!” It was an outburst that, however isolated, underscored the precarious balance Albanese now navigates—between outreach and unease and symbolism and reality.

The following morning, Albanese’s office posted on X an ode to how ‘diversity is our strength’.

If there ever was a Starmerite response of cowardly submission and politically expedient sycophancy to what was an obvious threat of violence, then this was it by a man up who, until now, most Australians considered to be at least level-headed and, in most respects, decent.

The end of the neoliberal ruling class is here

At first glance, Keir Starmer and Anthony Albanese govern in different hemispheres, with distinct electorates and political traditions. But their leadership styles—and the pressures shaping them—reveal some notable parallels.

Each rose to power, promising stability after ideological turbulence—Starmer after the Corbyn years in Britain and Albanese after a decade of Coalition rule in Australia. Neither is a natural firebrand.

Their instincts tend towards caution, calibration and incremental change rather than sweeping rhetoric or revolutionary change.

Their political bases are broad but uneasy. Inner-city progressives, working-class voters and diverse migrant communities often pull in different directions. On issues like the Israel–Gaza conflict or social cohesion, both leaders have had to balance competing moral and political demands—sometimes appearing equivocal as a result.

Supporters call it discipline; critics call it evasiveness. Whether it’s Starmer navigating protests and extremism concerns in the UK or Albanese responding to rising tensions at home, each has faced accusations of saying too little, too late—or trying to satisfy everyone but convincing no one.

However, in reality, they are one and the same. Both have a lifelong obsession with a now-obvious corrosive and gradually failing multiculturalism that has proven problematic and increasingly ungovernable as time goes on.

Both seem unwilling or incapable of confronting the most violent and neocolonialist threat of our time, that of violently militant Islam.

And it is becoming increasingly obvious that both are more than willing to sacrifice their respective countries on the altar of their vanities by refusing to admit that they were wrong on just about everything they have ever believed in.

That perhaps is the biggest tragedy for the citizens and futures of both countries.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)