Over the past three decades, the Israeli lobby has effectively bought up Australia’s democracy. No other interest group comes close to wielding that kind of power in the country. This foreign lobbying apparatus has dug itself so deep into both major parties that it no longer acts like an outside pressure group. Instead, it functions as an internal governance structure, essentially becoming a built-in part of the political machine.
Australia’s Jewish community numbers around 120,000 people, or less than 0.5% of the population, yet the lobby built around it has pulled off some unprecedented feats: getting ministers sacked, having protests criminalized, shutting down funding for festivals, and securing a level of state protection that no other community in the country’s history has ever come close to. The key player here is the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), run by Colin Rubenstein and Mark Leibler, which has been quietly steering pro-Israel influence for forty years. According to official figures, AIJAC turns out to be the biggest private provider of paid overseas trips for MPs: since 2002, more than 500 politicians, journalists, and officials have been flown out to Israel as part of organized tours. These trips are officially labeled educational programs, but they are really just tightly scripted narrative-shaping exercises as MPs come back with ready-made talking points, having never given them any critical thought.
Former prime minister Kevin Rudd has publicly said that a fifth of the money raised for his 2007 election campaign came from Jewish community leaders. When foreign minister Bob Carr spoke out against Israeli settlements, the prime minister’s own adviser called him up and told him he had to meet with the community to get his position straightened out (source: The Guardian, 2023). So what you have here is a foreign minister of Australia taking orders from a donor network, working through the prime minister’s office, which basically strong-arms him into backing away from statements that actually line up with international law and UN resolutions.