The Australian Prime Minister and his government are resorting to increasingly laughable measures to deflect public anger at their continued support for “Israel".

A day after "Israel" had committed yet another massacre against journalists in Gaza, luring them with a strike on a hospital before eliminating them in a "double-tap|' maneuver, the Labor government of Australia announced a major imminent foreign policy measure.

For a brief, fleeting moment, it appeared as though Anthony Albanese had listened to the demands of hundreds of thousands of protesters marching almost constantly throughout the country and was going to impose sanctions on the Israeli entity or even expel its ambassador over the Gaza slaughter.

Instead, the PM and his foreign minister, Penny Wong, engaged in a kind of public humiliation ritual, in which they asserted that Iran had “attacked” Australia by sponsoring the firebombing of a Melbourne synagogue and a Jewish delicatessen in Sydney through a convoluted web of criminal intermediaries.

Based on this “intelligence” provided by the national spy agency ASIO, the PM then announced the expulsion of the Iranian ambassador and his staff and the proscription of the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps, an institutional part of Iran’s political system, as a "terrorist organization".

When questioned live on national television on the specifics of what he was claiming, Albanese cut the figure of a lying schoolboy caught in the act, refusing to disclose any level of detail beyond the assertions themselves.  

Scarcely a day has gone by, and already members of the Israeli government are crowing that they were involved in pushing Australia to take this action. Whether the Mossad was a source of the “intelligence” provided to the Australian Prime Minister is unclear, but to this and almost every other query for the specifics of the claims underpinning this major foreign policy shift, Albanese has steadfastly refused to comment.

The public reaction to the government’s assertions, at least online, has been less than charitable. Elementary questions of why, amid the full spectrum of military, economic, and political pressure on the country, Iran’s leaders would choose to pay local vandals in Australia to firebomb a Melbourne synagogue and a Sydney deli, are curiously uninteresting to much of the country’s media, which is all too willing to accept the government’s assertions at face value.

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What benefit would Tehran possibly achieve by doing this, in Australia, of all places? The only other country possibly more removed from the Islamic Republic’s circle of concern, at least physically, might be New Zealand.

Of course, many will, and already have, concluded that this charade has less to do with any actual facts than it does the government’s ham-fisted attempts to deflect growing public outrage at its obstinate refusal to impose sanctions on "Israel" or even censure it for its genocidal behavior.

For nearly two years, since Oct. 7, 2023, the foreign minister, Penny Wong, has made it a near-daily ritual that each successive Israeli atrocity, rather than being condemned, is deemed merely a source of “concern” to the government.

Albanese himself, when the question of sanctions against "Israel" is raised, clearly seems to resent even having to address the issue, at one point rhetorically questioning what sanctions Australia should impose, seeming blissfully ignorant of his obligations under the Genocide Convention.

The government’s total disengagement stands in marked contrast to the Australian public, which has kept up one of the most consistent routines of public protest in support of Gaza, anywhere in the world. Just weeks ago, despite attempts to ban it, a protest spanning the Sydney Harbour Bridge drew global media attention. Just the following week, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets around the country.

As of this week, tens of thousands of university students are voting in a nationwide referendum on whether to condemn the government for its inaction and to demand diplomatic expulsions and sanctions against Israel.

In May, the Australian Labor government was returned to power in a landslide election victory. The Liberal party, the official right-wing opposition, is widely considered unable to win back government even in the next election three years away, facing potentially as much as a decade in the wilderness.

Given its lack of any political rival, the government’s obstinate ignoring of public opposition to genocide hardly seems motivated by electoral calculations. In the face of an unstable Trump administration bringing the US alliance into question, it is more content to fall back on politicized narratives of “national security” written by the intelligence community rather than reacting dynamically to a changed world.

Whatever the real reasons for this government’s industrial-scale obfuscation, it speaks to a profound moral rot at the heart of its politics, rather than it needs to invent excuses to expel an ambassador, but cannot bring itself to expel that of an entity committing the defining slaughter of the century in real-time.