Another open letter to my current MP

Hi [Labor MP], me again.

I'll confess that I've been intending to write something to you for a while now, but the world is a bit crazy these days and every time I thought I had zeroed in on a particular theme I wanted to share my thoughts on, something else has hit the news cycle straight away and I've had to restart my unsolicited essay from scratch. With World War 3 breaking out, I guess there's no avoiding it anymore.

I'll preface this by saying that I recognise you are not the Prime Minister, but I also don't sit in his electorate so you're standing in as his proxy. However fair that may or may not be I can only empathise with, but I'm also not the one who got into politics.

A quick run-through of the things I've wanted to express my thorough disapproval with Labor, and Anthony Albanese specifically, over the last several weeks — again, every time I sat down to write something, he'd dwarf the original topic with some new blundering gaffe, so at this point there's genuinely a list:

• rushing through censorship laws piggybacking off of a horrific national tragedy that clearly have little to do with antisemitism and far more to do with trying to keep people worried about the climate or Australia's material support in what's broadly considered to be genocide from irritating Albanese; I'm a New Yorker with Jewish heritage, I can see "political expedience" for what it is having lived through 9/11, as well as having watched how breathlessly that was capitalised on even before the bodies had been pulled out of the World Trade Center. History proved the utter, abysmal abdication of moral authority that war gallivant turned out to be, and I won't be told this crackdown in the name of "antisemitism" that plenty of Australian Jews don't support is anything else except using one tragedy to try and deal with an unrelated annoyance.
• said censorship laws being rammed through legislatively when queer people and other minorities have been advocating for similar protections for decades, only to have that not be included in supposed "comprehensive" anti-hatecrime laws — but Albanese still marched in Mardi Gras this past weekend, so I guess he's a great ally as long as he's not required to actually lift a finger to protect anyone; you've likely heard about a wide string of attacks against queer people by criminals luring them to meet up on dating apps and attacking them when they're there. This has generated a lot of news, suddenly, because the latest permutation of this may or may not involve individuals claiming to be aligned with Islamic State, but these attacks have happened for many, many years long before Murdoch's press could froth excitedly about being able to include "Muslim terrorists" in the same headline as "gay hookup apps." Queer people have been begging for protection from extremists for ages and at one point in time Albanese vocally supported those efforts — before he became Prime Minister, that is.
• Grace Tame; good god, if "completely avoidable public embarrassment" could be handed to one government official on a plate — Albanese went back for second helpings. It boggles the mind why the Prime Minister is doing word association games with hostile right-wing press given everything else his time and attention could be focussed on, but he really has no one else but himself to blame when he describes a victim of sexual assault, who has spent the majority of her young life advocating against men in positions of power who abuse it, as "difficult," while describing a felonious pervert mentioned over thirty-thousand times in a document dump belonging to the most notorious paedophile in recent memory as "President." Nobody remotely buys the attempted walk-back afterward of "I was only referring to her difficult life," please. I don't know which is worse, the blatant misogyny or how stupid he must believe we are. I think at least even Scott Morrison would have owned it, and I resent having to think better of Scott Morrison in a situation.
• Pauline Hanson doing what Pauline does and even other conservatives were shocked and horrified about it, but Albanese took a full day before he joined them in condemnation; I assume he wanted to see which way the wind was going to blow on Sky News before he decided to express an opinion disavowing appalling bigotry, but he's very quick to issue statements when he misjudges where support is going to be (I'll come back to this one in a moment).
• the general palling-about with Trump when braver leaders whose countries are much closer to the US are planting their feet and refusing to placate a bully. Look, I can only imagine the difficulty in diplomatically threading the needle when a nuclear superpower is lead by a pathological narcissist with the emotional regulation of a hungry two year old, but he doesn't have to look happy about it. He's certainly not required to post selfies with the man, either.
• and now the current crisis of the moment, the US and Israel committing international war crimes and there's Albanese first out of the gate giving both the thumbs up about it.

That all of these things take place against the backdrop of an economic and cost-of-living crisis disproportionately affecting those of us who are not the Prime Minister, now only likely to get worse as dementia weakens the Mad King's grip on where he is and what he's not supposed to do with the US' stockpile of tomahawk missiles, and you can perhaps begin to see why odious reptiles like Pauline Hanson are eager to seize the discontent even without Gina Rinehart — Australia's Temu Elon Musk — trying to bankroll her into The Lodge.

While I enjoy watching the Coalition embarrass itself as much as anyone who believes in equality, respect, dignity, and "not being a jerk" in general, their dysfunctionality appears to be giving Labor a false sense of security. Plenty of people have been mining old tweets of Albanese's where he criticised things the Coalition was doing that he is now equally guilty of himself — I don't believe that a politician, much less a person, can't change their minds, but many people are making the same connection that the Albanese of old seems to have lost a lot of his progressive values and virtues now that he's Prime Minister. If this is because of some misguided belief that conservatism has "won" and he needs to lurch to the right as well, the same mistake a lot of other leaders made in interpreting the absolute insanity of Trump winning the US election in 2024, I hope I can help disabuse that notion.

In the last day or so, a sitting Democrat was challenged for her seat by someone running against her after her vote in support of Trump's gestapo. She's held the seat for fourteen years and lost the primary on Tuesday 70% to 22% by a challenger whose platform was getting her out because her votes were the tiebreaker that allowed legislation making it easier for ICE to occupy a major city as part of their national racist brutalisation campaign. Similarly, a candidate in Texas also just won the Democratic nomination and has significant favourability despite the state Republicans' open vote-rigging and gerrymandering efforts. Labour in the UK just lost a seat they've held for nearly a century to a Greens candidate, the first ever Greens MP elected in the north of England, and Kier Starmer's former deputy is challenging the PM to be "braver" and says the election loss must be seen as a "wake up call."

It should be taken as a wake up call across the board. And it's not always wise to try and interpolate voter behaviour from one country into another, but the collapse of the Coalition vote (and the collapse of the Coalition itself, repeatedly and hilariously) here in 2025 — whose review was so scathing of how Dutton conducted the campaign that the Opposition leader threatened to sue for defamation — should be seen as a wake up call for Labor here, as well. It is not a good thing for a healthy democracy. While One Nation might siphon off disgruntled conservatives from the Coalition in the short term, it's patently obvious that Gina Rinehart is throwing so much money at Pauline Hanson not because she thinks she's electable — but because the objective is to move the Overton window that Labor operates in further and further to the right, too. The vast majority of the world does not want the world to become more conservative, meaner, nastier, more insular and violent to its people and its neighbours, and return to a time where the bigger and stronger took what they wanted when they wanted it. That is why those who do — and the billionaires who want to be left alone to operate with the impunity they believe their money should entitle them — are trying inordinately hard to amplify the voices of useful idiots who do not reflect the empathy, heart, and humanity that most of us actually feel towards one another but are too tired to do much about when we can barely pay rent or feed our families.

I don't want to see our Prime Minister taking smiling selfies with a criminal — convicted, accused, obviously guilty of in ways he managed to slime out of. I want the version of Anthony Albanese from over a decade ago who advocated for equality, fairness, speaking truth to power, and all of the things he was brave about when he had the luxury of not needing to back those words up with action.

I get that we're all scared of Murdoch, and Donald Trump, and an army of paid-for bots on social media. But we're also all taught early on that appeasing bullies doesn't make them leave you alone, it just makes them push you around more. I said to you last time, before the election, that people like me don't need to be told life will be worse under the Coalition — but as Democrats in the US are also discovering, establishment politicians who support the status quo and hope to get by on "hey, at least we aren't the other guys," like some sort of abusive ex partner capitalising on your fear to make you stay, this isn't working so much anymore. We expect a party that purports to call itself "centre-left" to actually advocate for progressive policies. It's in the absence of that, when people are fed up and don't see things getting better, that populists like Donald Trump and Pauline Hanson can slide in and take advantage of the disaffection.

I beg of Labor, at all levels of government, to give the country something better and more optimistic than "it could always get worse" — before it does under pathetic narcissists who use that need for change to only enrich themselves.