On Tuesday night, Penny Wong was heckled by pro-Palestine advocates at the University of Tasmania as she was giving a speech about how “disregard for international humanitarian law is increasing.” She was interrupted, by her own count, ten times, later telling ABC Radio Tasmania that she felt “a bit frustrated, I couldn’t even finish a sentence.”
“Everyone’s voice matters,” was her response to the hecklers, adding: “I don’t actually believe, I’ve never believed, that we gain anything by shouting each other down.”
In a clip broadcast by the ABC, one of said hecklers shouts: “what we need right now is leaders that have the backbone – that are willing to do something that isn’t just talk.”
Another says, quite plainly: “You’ve had your chances at a national and international level to change what is happening in Lebanon, in Palestine…there’s blood on your hands.”
In this year of gargantuan horror, Penny Wong can seem inconceivably small. The core joke of the Australian experience, especially when it comes to foreign affairs, is that we are a peculiarly farflung island nation squatting at the arse end of the Earth, and as such, what we do or say does not really matter. We are lackeys, at best. Do you think Benjamin Netanyahu knows who Penny Wong is? I doubt it. His aids might, but I’d say he doesn’t. And if he does? It’d be as another hired goon, stacking the weapon’s crates into trucks while he nods along, grinning.
Wong is nothing to Israel, really, which makes her position right now all the more farcical.
She is, however, a shepherd in this new holocaust. You can be an ultimately insignificant minister from an ultimately insignificant nation and still play a role shoving the bodies into the cattle cars. This simple truth seems inconceivable to Albanese, Wong, and their Government as a whole, who seem to think they are bit players in a small drama that will soon be forgotten, like Robodebt or the Tampa tragedy. Instead, they are standing on stage with their dick’s out, pissing vacantly in the wind, dripping in blood like they’re in the final scene of Carrie.
What does this will to be forgotten mean, exactly?
Remembrance of horror is a tricky thing. When they sound out the tally of ghouls responsible for this genocide in ten or twenty or a hundred years time, Penny Wong and Albo will probably be long forgotten, at least on the international stage. So it goes for faceless, gormless, henchmen types.
We, as Australians, almost by default (as our colonial history requires) tend to forgive through forgetting, consigning the great monsters of our history, be it distant or modern, to ‘the discourse’ or recurring occurrences as talking heads on panel shows. We have seen this recently, many times, with the Australian architects of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars free to walk about like they shouldn’t be clubbed to [redacted] in the street. Howard is still out there, mugging for the cameras now and then, like he isn’t directly responsible for the death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people.
The banality of evil is one thing, the dagginess of Australian evil is another.
It is possible that Wong and Albo will receive this forgiveness through forgetting — that the Australian public, inured to a media class as vacuous as it is culpable — will remember them as yet another crop of middle-managers from a decidedly middling government. And yet, there is a sense that the Genocide in Gaza — so big and hellish as to seem eternal — will haunt both ‘passive’ participant and factional fence-sitter alike to the end of their days.
This death, this horror, this blood, may just be Penny Wong’s and the ALP’s new brand, forever. *gulp* etc.
One can only imagine the existential crisis this is creating within people with the interiority of nats. Modern Labor is so obsessed with their image, so possessed by legacy, that they spend most of their energy managing one and deifying the other instead of actually doing much of anything. Their most virulent reactions to the genocide have of course come in response to criticisms of their reaction to it, and you can start to see a genuine fear in Albo and Wong’s eyes that this is what they will be best known for, that they have consigned themselves to the sharps disposal bin of history, a spiky void that holds in it the faintest whiff of blood and surgery.
Hence the calls for ‘social cohesion’ and the rest. To abet war crimes is one thing, to be constantly reminded one is abetting them is another. Frustration masks panic. Panic masks dread. You can press your ear to the rails of the ALP’s runaway train and feel the tug of the sinking feeling, that this is them now, that this may be inescapable, that what will probably reveal itself some day to be a million or more dead will stalk behind their ‘brand’ to the end of its days.
To them, the haunting, not the killing, is the real tragedy. It’s Shakespeare, it’s Macbeth, but a production mounted by a HR department too concerned as to whether ‘Scotsman’ is a slur to realise they’re slipping about in real human blood.
After murdering Duncan, Macbeth asks: “will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?” and he is answered, eventually, by fate and history, that no, it will not. When one stops to picture Wong in a year, in a decade, in half a century, it is impossible, for me at least, to imagine her without hands stained red by blood spilt by her acquiescence, her ‘level-headedness,’ her ‘sensible government,’ a Lady Macbeth by way of focus groups.
She may find that ‘frustrating,’ but so it goes.