ICJ ‘apartheid’ findings over illegal Israel settlements put Australia’s foreign policy at the brink
by Farah Abdurahman

Australia’s foreign policy via its support for Israel’s government is under strain like never before following claims of genocide at The Hague and now findings that Palestinians are subject to apartheid. By Farah Abdurahman.

International law, along with the ‘global rules-based order’, would now appear passe even though Australian politicians and mainstream media all but ignored the dramatic determination on Friday by the International Court of Justice declaring Israel’s occupation illegal and constituting apartheid. 

The deafening silence of Australia’s leadership in the midst of a ruling that may see Australia complicit in war crimes could have lasting implications for our government, which is now actively supporting and providing arms for what the World Court has decided amounts to an apartheid regime.

Although last Friday’s ICJ findings about Israel are “non-binding”, the UN’s highest court sets the rights and obligations of states under international law, and these can have practical ramifications for non-compliance.

The hypocrisy of Western nations with respect to the offensive in Ukraine as opposed to the assault on Gaza was amplified by a social media statement put out by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Penny Wong, who last Friday said, “We are carefully considering the detail of the ICJ opinion to fully understand the conclusions reached”.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese issued a statement saying Australia respected the ICJ’s “role in upholding international law and the rules-based order”.

“We want to see concrete steps taken by Israel to cease the expansion of settlements to respond to extremist activity.” 

The Labor government maintains it has called for a ceasefire in Gaza since late 2023 but has failed to take any meaningful steps to support a ceasefire and continues to provide military support to Israel. 

While leaders debated the ICJ ruling, another school in Gaza that was housing displaced women and children was bombed over the weekend. It was the ninth school bombed in two weeks.

The ICJ found Israel had committed numerous violations of international law during its 57 years of occupation.

Among the obligations violated by Israel is the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and the prohibition of the use of force to acquire land.

ICJ President Nawaf Salam said the court was calling on all UN States to adhere to their obligations under International Law to enforce the ruling.

“With regard to the right to self-determination, the Court considers that, while it is for the General Assembly and the Security Council to pronounce on the modalities required to ensure an end to Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and the full realisation of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, all States must co-operate with the United Nations to put those modalities into effect,” said Salam.

“As recalled in the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations — “Every State has the duty to promote, through joint and separate action, realization of the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, in accordance with the provisions of the Charter, and to render assistance to the United Nations in carrying out the responsibilities entrusted to it by the Charter regarding the implementation of the principle.”

The ICJ ruled 11-4 that Israel is under obligation to immediately end the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories per the 1967 borders and considered all presence of Israel in occupied Palestinian territories illegal.

In a 14-1 ruling, the court directed Israel to immediately cease all settlement activity, evacuate settlers from occupied Palestinian territories, and pay reparations to Palestinians who experienced damage by the Israeli occupation.

And in a 12-3 ruling, the court voted that UN states should: 

• Not render aid or assistance to Israel to continue the illegal occupation. 
• Must distinguish between Israel and occupied land.
• Not accept annexations or boundary changes to Palestinian territory and; 
• The General Assembly should consider the mechanism and process in which to bring about the end of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.

The ICJ ruling was provided in response to a request from the UN General Assembly back in 2022, which precedes the current Gaza conflict but provides a compelling report stripping impunity to Israel and its allies. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is currently in the US to make his fourth address to Congress to cement ongoing support for his war on Gaza, quickly rejected the ICJ ruling, declaring it “non-binding.”

Military activity in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank has escalated despite the ICJ ruling with violent incursions by armed Israeli settlers targeting essential infrastructure in the West Bank with reports of water pipes being cut to Palestinian villages and civilians assaulted in their homes. 

In Gaza, the remaining civil infrastructure supporting the 2.3 million displaced people surviving along the uninhabitable strip continues to experience heavy bombardment.

There are no hospitals that remain operational to tend to the wounded, and children are undergoing major surgery and limb amputations without anaesthetic or post-operative care.

Man-made famine continues to impact all Gazans, with the UN reporting at least 34 children have already died of hunger, many siblings from the same families. The current death toll of identified victims is around 38,900, and almost 90,000 are seriously wounded.

https://michaelwest.com.au/icj-apartheid-findings-over-illegal-israel-settlements-put-australias-foreign-policy-at-the-brink/

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Economics Editor

Don’t fall for the bogeyman theory of our troubled major constructions industry: its union has gone rogue, been infiltrated by criminal elements, and must be cleaned out, so life can return to normal. There’s much more to it than that.

But first, let’s be clear. I’m trying to explain the phenomenon, not make excuses for thuggery and lawbreaking – even if perpetrated by the union movement, with successive Labor governments pretending not to have noticed.

Anyone who remembers the exploits of Eddie Obeid in NSW knows Labor has form when it comes to turning a blind eye to illegality. Like the ACTU, Labor does need to clean up its act. And as always, lawbreaking should be punished.

Like every prime minister, premier, politician and union secretary in the country, I’ve long known that the construction union engages in thuggish, often illegal behaviour (see three royal commissions below). When my superannuation fund merged with the huge construction industry fund, I moved my money elsewhere.

But if it’s just a matter of Labor governments failing to punish the crimes of their union mates, ask yourself this: how come the Liberals haven’t fixed it? John Howard had almost a decade to do so, but the Australian Building and Construction Commission he set up in 2005 didn’t get far in the seven years before Labor abolished it.

Likewise, the Abbott government’s re-established commission didn’t get far in the seven or so years before the Albanese government re-abolished it last year.

Not enough people understand the unions’ role in the economy and how they go about advancing their members’ interests.

This problem’s been around for at least 40 years. The Hawke government deregistered the Builders Labourers Federation in the 1980s, but that didn’t work. Liberal federal and NSW governments have set up three royal commissions – in 1992, 2003 and 2015 – to no avail.

All of which should make you wonder why it’s so hard to fix such a seemingly simple problem. Could it be that the Libs aren’t fair dinkum either? Could it be that the big construction companies aren’t all that fussed about their union’s bad behaviour?

If so, could it be that they’re not privately pressing the Libs actually to fix the problem rather than just score political points against Labor?

We’re hearing about small contractors who aren’t game to stand up to union bullies for fear of retribution. I don’t doubt it’s true. But the construction companies running the show are huge. I don’t believe that, if they really wanted to rid themselves of union thugs, they lack the brains or the wherewithal to make it happen.

Remember too that when it comes to industrial relations, it’s always the unions that look bad, never the employers. That’s because the world is run by bosses. When everyone does what the boss tells them to, there’s never a problem.

But when the workers form a union to challenge the boss’s decision to pay them peanuts – or to run worksites where you could lose your life – it’s always the union that’s making trouble. It’s always greedy workers who strike and make you walk to work, never intransigent bosses. The media almost invariably fall for this characterisation.

We’re hearing that the rogue union’s disruptions and success in extracting excessive wages and conditions have forced up the cost of big city buildings, railways and motorways. It may look that way, but I’m not sure that it’s true.

Nor am I persuaded by the claim that high wages in the construction sector have flowed through to home building, and so explain why it’s so hard to afford to buy a place. This is a tricky way of claiming that employed carpenters, sparkies, plumbers, tilers and all the rest are grossly overpaid. Bulldust.

And Peter Dutton’s attempt to link union thuggery to the cost-of-living crisis is laughable. Whatever the union’s doing to construction costs, it’s been doing for 40 years, not just the past two.

Next they’ll be telling us the bullying will force the Reserve Bank to raise interest rates again.

But consider this thought experiment. I reckon that if Anthony Albanese could wave a wand and remove all union presence from the construction industry, the effect on the cost of major constructions would be minor.

Why? Because, although the untrained don’t know it, and some economists seem to have forgotten it, the biggest single message of conventional economics is that market prices aren’t just set by the cost of production – supply – but by the interaction of supply with demand.

If it’s true that a rogue union’s demands have been able to push up the costs of constructing office towers and all the rest quite excessively, how come employers have had no trouble passing those excessive costs on to their customers?

Partly because the union has imposed the higher cost on all the businesses in the industry, but mainly because any outfit that wants a city building, or government that wants a motorway, has no choice but to pay up. When economists say that the demand for the output of the construction industry is highly “price inelastic”, that’s what they mean.

But why can the industry get away with high costs? Why do its customers have no choice but to pay? Two reasons. First, the industry enjoys “natural protection”. That is, you can’t import office blocks.

Second, the industry is dominated by a just few big companies. It’s an oligopoly. It lacks effective competition between the local players.

Point is, magically remove the unions and none of that changes. If so, why would the big companies lower their prices? Why wouldn’t they keep charging the prices they know the market will bear?

Not enough people understand the unions’ role in the economy and how they go about advancing their members’ interests. The mistake is to imagine that the bosses represent capitalism, whereas the unions represent anti-capitalism.

No. Union bosses are capitalists too. The true contest is between the representatives of the two main “factors of production”: capital and labour. So unions are an integral part of the modern capitalist system. They’re a countervailing force that helps keep the system in balance.

Take out the unions, and capital ends up with almost all the money, and the households whose income comes from selling their labour have very little. In which case, the capitalists have no one to buy their products. Unions save the capitalists from their own excesses.

But get this: the unions are rogue capitalists who try to beat the real capitalists at their own game. The most successful capitalism comes from finding a business where it’s possible to make super-profits (in the jargon, to earn “economic rent”).

Turns out that’s also what the most successful unions do: find an industry whose circumstances allow it to earn super-profits and then demand a generous share for the workers. Guess what? A good example of an industry earning economic rent is construction.

And my guess is that the construction industry oligopoly finds it quite convenient to have a union that goes around bullying smaller businesses. Why? Because what they’re doing is policing the industry’s “barriers to entry”.

Ross Gittins unpacks the economy in an exclusive subscriber-only newsletter. 

https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/construction-industry-a-honeypot-that-capital-and-labour-fight-over-20240721-p5jvai.html

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Whilst the global impact of climate disruption is rapidly accelerating, and the last, record-breaking year has been extraordinary, public concern in Australia about it is waning, and the government bears much of the responsibility.

Just two years ago, the Climate 200-sponsored Teals helped sweep a climate-denialist government from power, and the Greens had their best result ever. It was the climate election, but it doesn’t feel like that now.

Since coming to power, the Albanese Labor government has been working hard not to talk about climate warming impacts, not to lead the nation in a public conversation about how to face the greatest threat to our future, and it shows in recent public opinion research.

On 24 June, the Guardian reported on polling conducted for Veolia by the French research company Elabe across 26 countries representing 67% of global greenhouse gas emissions. It found that:

• Just 60% of Australians accept that climate disruption is human-caused, which was a fall of six percent compared to a poll 18 months earlier. This was 13% lower than the global average of 73%.
• Australia was the fifth lowest, behind the USA (66%), the UK (72%), China (82%) and India (86%). 
• Only half (52%) of Australians thought “the costs caused by the damage linked to climate disruption and pollution are going to be greater than the investments needed for the ecological transition of our societies”. This was the lowest percentage of the 26 countries surveyed.

Polling by Lowy has shown a small fall since 2022. Concern was highest when Lowy started polling on the issue in 2006 (with 68% agreeing that “global warming is a serious and pressing problem. We should begin taking steps now even if this involves significant costs”). That figure fell sharply to 36% when Tony Abbott as opposition leader was in full cry, and peaked at 61% in 2019 (at the end of a multi-year El Nino) and in 2024 was at 57%.

The Elabe results are depressing, but there are material reasons. The standout is the unwillingness of the Albanese government to give any public focus to climate impacts. It is clear the Prime Minister’s Office decided that the way to handle the politics of climate was to talk a lot about wind and solar, hydrogen, batteries and Australia as an “energy superpower” and talk as little possible about the impacts — now and in the future — of a hotter and more disrupted world.

In the global arena, the government’s intent is clear: to justify AUKUS and comply with pressure from the US military industrial complex and the fossil fuel industry, China must always be presented as the big threat, despite climate change being a far greater, genuinely existential threat to all nations. In contrast, the World Economic Forum’s 2023 survey of global leaders found that the biggest three risks in the coming decade were all climate-related, whilst “geo-economic confrontation” (read China) came in ninth. Domestically, it is about renewable energy and jobs, along with the “strategic” importance of gas expansion to maintain fossil fuel donations.

The Australian Security Leaders Climate Group’s Too hot to handle report showed that (to March this year) Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has referred to renewable energy on 373 occasions, with big numbers for battery (133), storage (165), hydrogen (143), coal (172), pumped hydro (32) and renewable energy superpower (105). The climate emergency rated 32 mentions and extreme weather or heat 15. On specific climate impacts there was little: sea levels got nine mentions, Antarctica rated four mentions, and the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) just one. Words relating to key climate systems — tipping points, permafrost, the slowing Atlantic circulation, the Amazon and extinction — score zero mentions.

Likewise for Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek. In February and March 2024, as large sections of the GBR bleached and died due to unprecedented hot ocean temperatures, the responsible minister said not a word. Her ministerial website records just three mentions of the reef over those two months — all in the first half of February — and they related to the appointment of a “New Chair for Reef 2050 Independent Expert Panel” (sic), the delivery of a progress report on the Reef to UNESCO, and Great Barrier Reef Wetlands Strategy; all of which are part of ongoing political contortions to avoid the reef being placed on the UNESCO “endangered” list, when in reality it is in a death spiral.

Most blatant of all was the government’s decision to hide in the bottom drawer, marked never to be released, an assessment of security-related climate risks, delivered to the government in December 2023 by the Office of National Intelligence. And the reason? This startling analysis of the climate impacts on Australia’s future was something the government did not want the public to understand.

The government does not want to talk about future climate risks because it is conspiring with the fossil fuel industry to make the problem worse. Since the 2022 election, the Albanese has approved four new coal projects, approved the drilling of 116 new coal seam gas wells, defended in court the right of the coal industry not to consider the climate impact of opening new fossil fuel projects, and passed legislation designed to expedite the expansion of the gas industry, according to the Australia Institute.

And now the federal government has approved new gas exploration permits in waters off South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania, along with carbon export permits to encourage CCS, a technology not proven at scale.

The Prime Minister and various ministers have flown to India, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam to lock in customers for our gas and coal. One single gas export hub is getting half of what Australia has committed to global climate finance over five years. And government subsidies to fossil fuel producers jumped by 31% to $14.5 billion over the last year. Ludicrously, Japan in turn re-exports our gas which is surplus to their requirements whilst our fossil fuel industry demands further expansion. 

It is unsurprising that the 2024 Sustainable Development Report gave Australia one of the lowest scores for ‘climate action’ – ranking fourth-last out of the 168 countries, only ahead of Qatar, Brunei and the United Arab Emirates.

This climate vacuum has consequences. Richard Kirkman, the chief executive of Veolia in Australia, said the survey results suggested “we need to do more work in telling the stories about the facts… We don’t have the full support of the people and we don’t have the political support.”

And Tony Barry of Redbridge has warned that support for renewable energy is falling. Two weeks ago, he told the Clean Energy Council’s annual summit that since the 2022 election, “there’s been a failure to continue prosecuting the case for renewable energy, including providing further definition around the rewards… In politics, if you allow a message vacuum to occur, your opponents will fill it for you. Which is exactly what is happening.”

This in part explains why Peter Dutton’s nuclear energy push (in reality a climate denial and anti-renewables dog-whistle) is doing OK in the polls, with 48% saying the plan “is serious, and should be considered as a part of the nation’s energy future”, not understanding the dire implications of further emission increases.

In all of this, there are signs of a repeating pattern in which both Labor governments and the big, professional climate advocacy not-for-profits act in the belief that you can sell big-picture climate action without first convincing people of the need for that action — the prospect of an unliveable planet — and without being frank that this path will require big, necessary and disruptive economic change.

This belief that it’s all a big, positive story that does not need “doom and gloom” — that is, a broad understanding that the risks are existential — runs contrary to the evidence about what works: whether it be quit smoking campaigns, the Grim Reaper AIDS advertising, or the brutal honesty about Covid and the need for immunisation. The 2011 carbon tax debate in Australia at the time of the Gillard Labor government is a salutary example.

Back then, the Labor government and the big climate groups tried to convince people of the worth of the planned carbon tax by completely forgetting the health promotion lesson. The impacts of climate change on people’s lives now and in the future didn’t get a mention. Instead they ran campaigns about “clean energy futures” and “saying yes”. It was all happy-clappy, win-win; all about selling “good news” and not mentioning “bad news”.

This brightsiding approach, based on positive psychology, is the stuff of motivational speakers, of many personal development courses, of personality and religious cults, and of most politics today. It is an unrelenting false positiveness disconnected from reality. And what happened in 2011 with the happy-clappy “Clean energy futures” campaign? Public support fell, because the government tried to sell the answer without elaborating the problem.

Now another Labor government is going down the same path.

https://johnmenadue.com/the-albanese-government-has-created-a-climate-vacuum-and-we-will-pay-the-price/

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In a blow that will strike little fear into the hearts of the Israeli Government, Foreign Minister Wong has announced sanctions against seven West Bank settlers.

It (coincidentally) follows the sanctioning of these seven settlers a few days earlier by the United States.

Just who are these settlers? Nobody really knows, or cares. In the regular attacks by Israeli settlers, in the Kristallnacht-style attacks on food convoys by Israeli civilians whilst the military and police look on, and in the graphic social media posts of armed settlers posing with mutilated bodies, it seems that these seven are the most egregious.

Unlikely to ever travel to Australia, the seven will [not]suffer grievously from the Australia’s sanctions and travel bans. But this Government and Foreign Minister Wong are able to hold their heads high because they have taken decisive action against these insignificant seven.

I am pleased that Australia has found the courage to call out these exemplars of atrocity whilst ignoring the hundreds of Israeli soldiers boldly posting evidence of their war crimes on social media.

Posing as the most ‘moral’ army in the world, they cheerfully force civilians into safe areas and then proceed to bombard them with US supplied blockbuster bombs.

This is a ‘moral’ army whose soldiers admit to indiscriminate recreational shooting of civilians to relieve boredom.

A ‘moral’ army deliberately starves a trapped population while denying them access to medical aid because hospitals are used by the Israeli troops as command bases before destroying all life saving medical devices when they depart.

The Australian Government sees fit to sanction not one of these clearly identifiable Israeli perpetrators of criminality and war crimes. It excels in the occasional mealy-mouthed request to Israel to engage in peace talks but refuses to mention genocide. Quick to suspend aid funding to UNRWA on the merest unsubstantiated allegation by Israel, it is painfully slow to take any other definitive action.

This powerful act of sanctioning seven nondescript individuals replicates the charade of concern Australia displayed in demanding accountability for the attack on the World Central Kitchen aid convoy. Working hand in glove with the perpetrators, it came as no surprise that the hastily convened commission of enquiry found no fault with the action of the Israeli military.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong said the death of seven aid workers in Gaza ” was obviously a deadly failure. It cannot be brushed aside and it cannot be covered over,” but that was the result the Australian Government accepted.

The Australian reaction was, as Macbeth laments “full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.” The current individual sanctions that ignore the ongoing commission of war crimes in Gaza fall into line with the same miserable record.

I am disgusted that it took so long for Australia to take action that does not even address the issue of war crimes. I am deeply ashamed that it took the death of one Australian worker to trigger the semblance of action by Wong and Albanese in a way that the deaths of an estimated 30,000 children could not.

Australia has the opportunity again to establish some credibility to back up its oft-repeated mantra of supporting the global rule-based order and its obligations to the UN and the Rome Accords. The sanctions against the seven are a charade undermines any potential credibility and further weakens Australia’s influence within our region.

It is a charade that was slow to recognise the mounting international disgust at both the aid convey attacks and the ongoing calculated commission of war crimes in Gaza.

On the international stage, Australia could take a lead in condemning the continued commission of war crimes in Gaza. Australia could refer Israel’s attacks on neighbouring countries and diplomatic compounds to the United Nations and press for immediate action.

It could use its much-vaunted special relationship with the United States to press President Biden to halt the flow of weapons to Israel.

Australia could open its own investigation into the role, if any, played by Pine Gap and the North West Cape facilities in providing targeting information– although perhaps not, as these facilities are for all intents and purposes, sovereign US territory.

Australia could withdraw its intelligence agents currently based in Jordan that are playing a classified role in the region which may, or may not, include providing information used by the Israelis in their drone strikes.

Australia could take a leadership role and show its genuine commitment to the global rules based order by imposing sanctions and restrictions on Israeli products entering Australia.

As it has been so ready to do in the past in relation to other conflicts, it could criminalise those who travel to Israel with the intent of joining a military involved in these war crimes. The right to self-defence is not a right to a disproportionate response with atrocity piled on atrocity, war crime upon war crime.

Lord Nelson ignored orders by putting his telescope to his blinded eye. Following his example Foreign Minister Wong has imposed sanctions on an insignificant seven and this stands as a beacon of moral cowardice in the face of evil.

https://johnmenadue.com/the-insignificant-seven/

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