ECAJ 2016 Federal Election Questionnaire

20th June 2016

As the elected representative body and voice of the of the Australian Jewish community, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry is determined to ensure that our community is engaged in the political process and informed about the policies and views of the main parties contesting the 2016 federal election.

To this end, we asked the Coalition, the Australian Labor Party, the Australian Greens, the Jacqui Lambie Network and the Nick Xenophon Team to answer specific questions about issues of special concern to the Australian Jewish community, including matters relating to our physical security and our freedom to practice our faith, and on Australia-Israel relations and the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
The complete responses of each party can be accessed via our website, together with a comparative Table of key extracts from each party’s answers.

We wish to convey our appreciation to each of the parties for their co-operation and comprehensive responses, which will serve to inform both our community and the broader public ahead of the forthcoming election. We encourage everyone to read all of the responses carefully and to make their own assessments. The following observations are intended to highlight points which we believe will be of particular interest to members of the Jewish community.

Communal security
At present, on the basis of security assessments by law enforcement agencies, the Commonwealth Government provides direct assistance to Jewish and other religious schools to meet part of their security costs. No financial assistance is provided for other vulnerable facilities including community centres, museums and synagogues. In the case of non-school Jewish institutions, such costs are met entirely by the Jewish community itself.
Both the Coalition and Labor have now pledged to extend the category of communal facilities which are eligible for security funding assistance.
The Coalition has announced the establishment of a $40 million Safer Communities Fund, part of which will in part be directed to “community organisations that are facing security risks associated with racial or religious intolerance.”
Labor has also acknowledged the need to “support necessary improvement to security in the wider community” and has announced that it will commit $500,000 to “significantly upgrade security at the Beth Weizmann Community Centre in Melbourne.
The Jacqui Lambie Network supports extending security assistance to Jewish communal facilities.
The Greens and the Nick Xenophon Team have both indicated that they would support commonwealth funding for communal facilities where the merits of doing so have been established.

Education
The Coalition, Labor and the Greens have all promised to increase funding for independent schools, including Jewish schools.
Labor and the Greens are in favour of full implementation of the Gonski reforms.
Nick Xenophon and Jacqui Lambie would maintain current levels of funding for independent schools, including Jewish schools.

Racial Vilification
All parties have stated they do not support repeal or amendment of sections 18C and 18D of the Racial Discrimination Act.
Labor and the Greens have affirmed their steadfast support for the Racial Discrimination Act and highlighted their role in opposing previous attempts to repeal or weaken sections 18C and 18D.

Israel
Palestinian Statehood
The Coalition and Jacqui Lambie Network have expressly rejected recognition of a Palestinian State other than in the context of a negotiated peace agreement with Israel.
Labor has confirmed that, as resolved at its 2015 National Conference, the Party would consider recognising a Palestinian state if the next round of peace negotiations fails to yield a two-state solution.
Nick Xenophon has reiterated his support for a two-state solution but has not stated whether he supports recognising a Palestinian state other than as a consequence of a negotiated peace agreement.
The Greens recognise a Palestinian state.
Australia-Israel relations
Every party with the exception of the Greens explicitly supports greater bilateral relations between Israel and Australia at all levels, including government, business, cultural, academic and people-to-people. The Greens have stated that any bilateral relations should promote peace, democracy, human rights and other values and that Australia’s relationship with Israel should reflect these principles.
BDS
BDS is not the policy of any political party in Australia.
Nick Xenophon and Jacqui Lambie have both stated that they do not support BDS.
The Greens have affirmed that BDS is not the policy of the Australian Greens.
Labor has forcefully repudiated BDS, referring to prior consistent statements to this effect, and has also branded BDS as “harming Palestinian people economically” and “unhelpful to the Middle East peace process.”
The Coalition states that BDS is a “blatantly antisemitic campaign” and has denounced those who support it “… including university academics, trade unions, members of the Labor Party, the Greens and Local Government.”
The Coalition and the Jacqui Lambie Network have also stated that in addition to opposing BDS they are opposed to MPs providing political or other support for individuals or organisations which promote BDS.

Religious Freedom
Shechita
The Greens have not stated whether they are in favour of maintaining existing laws concerning religious slaughter of animals in Australia and have called for “greater accountability and transparency in all Australian abattoirs”.
All other parties have confirmed that they are in favour of maintaining existing laws relating to kosher slaughter.
Freedom of Conscience
All parties are in favour of religious ministers retaining the right to decide for themselves whether they wish to solemnise any marriage.
The Greens support the repeal of religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws.

Antisemitism
The Coalition, Labor and the Jacqui Lambie Network accept the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)-endorsed definition of antisemitism, which also recognises antisemitism in the context of extreme attacks on the State of Israel, involving for example, Holocaust inversion or the denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.
Nick Xenophon and the Greens have issued general condemnations of antisemitism without adopting the IHRA-endorsed definition.

Michael Danby MP calls for bigotted Greens candidate Stephanie Hodgins-May to be sacked

   

Thursday, 09 June 2016

STATEMENT

THE HON MICHAEL DANBY MP

MEMBER FOR MELBOURNE PORTS

Local Greens candidate Stephanie Hodgins-May has announced she will pull out of the only Melbourne Ports candidates’ debate, after having agreed to participate “because one of the co-hosts” was the Jewish community roof body, Zionism Victoria.

Michael Danby, Member for Melbourne Ports, said:

“This is shameful. The Greens Party mask is finally off. The Greens boycott of the Jewish community shows their deep and intractable antagonism towards the Australian Jewish community.

Zionism Victoria is a roof body organisation of cross-spectrum groups which support Israel, including pluralistic Australian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS), which operates across Australian universities, the international affiliate of the Israeli Labour Party, Ameinu Australia, and includes socialist Zionist youth movements like Hashomer Hatzair and Habonim Dror.

“The Greens Party candidate from Daylesford, an advisor to Greens Leader Di Natale, is unfit to represent Melbourne Ports. Nearly a third of the electorate is of Jewish heritage. Refusing to address this public forum on the bigoted grounds that she has is an insult to the local community.”

“Approximately 71% of Australian Jewish residents of Melbourne Ports have family in Israel”, Danby recounted. “If she doesn't want to represent our local Jewish community, or even speak to them, she cannot be their local Member. Greens leader Richard Di Natale must sack her.”

“Her excuse that candidates shouldn't address politically active groups makes no sense. She is a political candidate and political staffer for the Green Political Party. She wants to be a representative of a diverse Melbourne Ports community - candidates for such a position speak to all kinds of groups, whether or not they agree with them,” Danby said.

Green Party hypocrisy and bigotry is underlined by the activity in the neighbouring seat of Melbourne, where Green Member for Melbourne Adam Bandt will address a forum held by the Australian Palestinian Advocacy Network,” Danby said. “This is a purely political group that is not a community organisation, nor does it represent tens of thousands of local residents, unlike the Jewish group the Greens are boycotting in Melbourne Ports.”

Michael Danby said Party leader Richard Di Natale, who cloaks himself as more moderate than other Green Senators such as Lee Rhiannon, must replace Hodgins-May with someone who will speak freely to all groups in Melbourne Ports.

Greens support "Palestinian" advocacy but boycott Zionism

From the Jewish News, June 9, 2016:

GREENS candidates will attend an election forum hosted by the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN), but not Zionism Victoria.

Stephanie Hodgins-May has pulled out of The AJN’s election forum for Melbourne Ports because ... Zionism Victoria is co-hosting the event.

“I don’t believe it is appropriate and right to speak at an event co-organised by a politically active organisation,” she said referring to Zionism Victoria.

Hodgins-May agreed to attend the debate in mid-May.

On May 30 AJN editor Zeddy Lawrence told Hodgins-May during an email exchange that it would be co-hosted by Zionism Victoria... That prompted her withdrawal from the debate.

...Hodgins-May’s comments and withdrawal came as a shock to The AJN and the community because Greens MP Adam Bandt is attending a forum hosted by APAN next week titled, Melbourne candidate forum: Palestine and Israel: adopting a just position.

Hodgins-May said it is not “appropriate and right” to speak at an event hosted by a politically active organisation, but APAN calls for people to “spend just one minutes to email candidates asking them to pledge to support Palestine” and recently held an event to “bring awareness to and influence Australia’s public policy regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict.”

...The AJN has contacted Adam Bandt and Greens leader Richard Di Natale this morning for comment but has not received a reply.

Open letter to the "Australian Centre for Jewish Education" about the Australian launch of StandWithUs

Director ACJC

Assoc. Professor Mark Baker

Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation (ACJC)
Monash University, Vic.

Dear Sir,

We have a program on Jewish community radio J-AIr 87.8 FM Melbourne covering Israel and Jewish related issues. One of our regular topics is Anti-Zionism on Campus and in Academia.

You may be aware that internationally respected Israel advocacy organization, StandWithUs, is establishing an office in Australia.

Based on previous attempts by StandwithUs to help counter the epidemic of anti- Zionism and anti- Semitism in Melbourne, we learned that you and your ACJCstaff were fiercely opposed to any form of Israel advocacy on campus. We understand you or one of your fellow academics stated that university campus was not the place for Israel advocacy.

One of our topics on our program next Tuesday will cover StandWithUs, its previous encounters via AIJAC, and Joel Burnie. We would like to hear from you or one of the ACJC representatives to understand your current stance on the matter since that 2008 encounter.

Alternatively, if you are not willing to make an ACJC staff member available to discuss this topic, I have enclosed a list of questions, which you can answer in writing. This way, we can still inform our listeners of your point of view - we believe it is important that our listeners hear both sides of any dispute, so they make up their own minds.

We at Nothing Left strongly believe in 'not shutting down debate' and conducting civil discussion.

In the past, your academics made the StandWithUs issue public by speaking with mainstream media. As such, we have cc'd a number of other interested parties. Given ACJC is a community funded department, we are sure your benefactors and supporters would also like to be kept in the loop.

We would appreciate if you could please respond by 4pm Monday 6 June, 2016, with either an acceptance to discuss the issues / questions below on-air next Tuesday, 7 June between 9 - 11am, or if you are not willing to participate in a discussion on-air, in writing via email.

1.       Will StandWithUs representatives be made welcome by ACJC on Monash University grounds? (Yes / No)

2.       Will Standwithus be given an equal opportunity to speak with Jewish students along with Israel -Critical guest speakers that you have from time to time? (Yes / No)

3.       Can you clarify the following:

o Do you or any of the ACJC current or former staff believe Israel's flag should be changed because the 'Magen David' Star of David may offend or not relate to Israel's Arab / Muslim minority? (Yes / No)

o Do  you or any current or former ACJC Staff suggest changing Israel's national anthem 'Hatikva' because it offends or does not relate to Israel's minority Arab / Muslim citizens (Yes / No)

4.       What is the ACJC and staff position on Israel remaining a Jewish State i.e. a State for the Jews?

Thank you,

Nothing Left Co- Host
MIchael Burd 

Australia stands up for Israel at World Health Organisation

From AJN, 2 June 2016:

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop was thanked by Jewish communal leaders for Australia voting against a motion condemning Israel at the World Health Organisation World Assembly.

...communal leaders thanked [Foreign Minister Julie Bishop] for taking a principled stance against an anti-Israel motion put forward at the World Health Organisation (WHO) World Assembly.

Australia was one of just eight countries to reject the motion condemning the Jewish State for violating “mental, physical and environmental health”.

Backed by 107 member nations, it was the only proposal at last week’s gathering that singled out a specific country for criticism.

Co-sponsored by the Arab Group of States and the Palestinian representatives, the motion also called for a WHO delegation to investigate and report back on “the health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory” and in “the occupied Syrian Golan”.

Writing to Bishop to express their gratitude for Australia’s vote, Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) national chairman Mark Leibler and executive director Colin Rubenstein noted, “Despite the many extremely serious violations of rights in relation to health in countries such as Syria, the country selected for unique disapprobation was once again Israel.

“In fact, the motion also critically called attention to Israel’s record on the Golan Heights, and relied on a typically jaundiced report from the Syrian government to do so, even though the Syrian government has killed hundreds of thousands of its own people.”

... the Australian stand was “all the more honourable, praiseworthy and welcome” because “to their shame, many Western democracies joined the lynch mob declaring, in effect, that Israel was the only nation to violate human rights in this area. It may therefore have been easier for our delegation to go along with the crowd, and abstain or even vote in favour.

... “Israel has devoted considerable resources to improving the health of residents of the West Bank and Gaza. According to the World Bank, average life expectancy in those areas in 2014 was 73, above that for the wider Middle East and North Africa. This has risen from an estimated 48 in 1967.”

They added that figures from UNICEF show that the infant mortality rate in the West Bank and Gaza has fallen from 158 per 1000 live births in the 1950s to 13.5 in the West Bank and 15.5 in Gaza by 2014.

They also noted that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians receive treatment in Israeli hospitals. In 2012 alone, almost 220,000 Palestinian patients were treated, more than 21,000 of them children.
The letter concluded that “these figures go some of the way to demonstrating how ludicrous was the overall vote” on the motion, and expressed AIJAC’s gratitude for Ms Bishop’s leadership “in ensuring Australia, unlike so many other governments, has in exercising its vote in this matter, yet again demonstrated sound judgement, considerable courage and moral clarity”...

Labour party antisemitism: a lesson for Australia

From The Spectator, 21 May 20-16, by Alex Ryvchin*:

The Australian Left must learn from British Labour’s antisemitism scandal

Bob Carr - conspiracy theorist of Australian Labor

 

British Labour may be in the throes of a crisis that could keep the party out of national government for a generation and threatens its claims to be a progressive political party committed to anti-racism and social justice.

The crisis is entirely of the party’s own making. Plastered across the social media pages of its councillors, activists, members of the House of Commons and even its esteemed party grandees has been unabashed racism directed squarely at the Jews.

Concerns about antisemitism in Britain’s far-left surfaced at the time of the election of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader in September 2015. While Corbyn himself has not been accused of antisemitism, he has maintained a disturbing proximity to a melange of violent Islamists, Holocaust-deniers and terrorist organisations openly orientated towards the annihilation of the Jews.
Corbyn’s judgement nurtured the suspicion that Labour’s long-suppressed Trotskyite elements – the kind that sees Jewish money and power lurking behind every inequity – was being ushered into Britain’s political mainstream.

Then on March 15, the vice-chair of Labour’s Woking branch, Vicky Kirby, was reluctantly suspended by the party after claiming that Jews have ‘big noses’, ‘slaughter the oppressed’, and that Hitler was a ‘Zionist God’.

Labour Councillor Aysegul Gurbuz was then forced to resign after the discovery of social media posts that praised Hitler as the ‘greatest man in history’. She also expressed the hope that Iran would use ‘nuclear weapons’ to ‘wipe Israel off the map’.

Then Naz Shah, the Labour MP for Bradford West who ousted George Galloway, himself no stranger to antisemitism, was found to have expressed support for the forcible deportation of Israel’s six million Jews to the United States.
 

Perhaps the most extraordinary turn came from Ken Livingstone, a former Mayor of London and an important figure in the Labour left, who in coming to Shah’s defence, made a series of remarks breathtaking in their ignorance. Unable to deny Shah’s antisemitism, for which she apologised, Livingstone asserted that it was ‘over the top’ to claim that ‘antisemitism and racism are exactly the same thing’, thereby reducing hatred of the Jews to an ostensibly lesser class of racism.

Livingstone also claimed that Hitler had been a ‘supporter of Zionism’. The historian Antony Beevor called Livingstone’s remarks ‘grotesque’. The Nazis considered forcibly expelling Europe’s Jews to places that included Madagascar and the British Mandate of Palestine, before pursuing their total annihilation. Ethnic cleansing was the Nazis sole motivation. The Jewish people’s right of self-determination, which is at the core of Zionism, never remotely entered into the Nazis’ thinking.
Livingstone then predictably claimed it was the ‘Israel lobby’ that had orchestrated the Labour troubles, shifting blame to an easy target and away from those who had wilfully professed deeply bigoted views.

The coup de grâce came when Livingstone, seemingly attempting to bury one outrageous statement under another, argued that a distinction should be made between ‘just hating the Jews in Israel’ and ‘hating their Jewish neighbour in Golders Green’ (a suburb of north London famous for having a high Jewish population), with only the latter being a problem.

This last statement is perhaps the clearest demonstration of the moral bankruptcy underpinning the increasingly tolerated ‘anti-Zionism’. At the heart of Livingstone’s theorem is a stripping of the Jews of their individuality and humanity and reduction to a binary – what he considers to be the ‘good Jew’ and the ‘bad Jew’. The Jews of Israel, all of them, are necessarily bad and wicked. Dehumanised, these people are made deserving of our hatred.

Livingstone’s remarks are a study in the far-left’s singular treatment of antisemitism, compared to every other form of racism and intolerance. This lesson is as applicable to Australia as it is to Britain.

Aside from honourable exceptions, when forced to confront an incident of antisemitism, even when irrefutable, the far-left has sought to deny, invert and ultimately shift blame onto the victims themselves, always culminating in a gratuitous and predictable attack on the ‘Jewish lobby’, a form of conspiracy theory ...[like that of Bob Carr and his supporters - SL]. Could one imagine the far-left mounting such a response to an allegation of homophobia, sexism or Islamophobia?

As the experience of British Labour has shown, antisemitism is very real and there remain those who reserve a unique and unwavering hatred for the dominant symbols of Jewish self-identification – the Jewish community, the Jewish faith and the Jewish nation-state.

In 2014, the Socialist Alternative was deregistered as a club by Monash University following the harassment of Jewish students by its members.

At Sydney University in 2015, students from the far-left shouted their support for Hizb ut-Tahrir to a predominantly Jewish audience while a senior academic, Jake Lynch, was filmed in the act of waving banknotes in the face of an elderly Jewish woman.

Incredibly, the actions of Lynch and the students were stridently defended by many on the left, including members of parliament and the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties. In 2013, NSW Upper House MP Shaoquett Moselmane railed against the ‘. . . blind[ing] power of a political lobby group that is cancerous and malicious’ in a piece of rhetoric that might have made the Iranian regime blush.

Amidst this scandal, British Labour is struggling to remain credible as an alternative government.

If a similar worldview took hold of the Australian left, it too would risk becoming un-backable, unelectable and irrelevant.

*Alex Ryvchin is the Public Affairs Director of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the peak representative body of the Australian Jewish community, and a regular Speccie contributor

Australian security experts learn from Israel

Based on an article in J-Wire, May 20, 2016:
             
A group of  Australian business people, intelligence experts and academics have participated in the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce Security Delegation to Israel co-organised with Perth’s Edith Cowan University.

The purpose of the Security Delegation is: to study Israel's world-leading security and cyber-security systems and technology and the Start-Up business ecosystem that conceives them; and to understand how Australia can potentially adopt similar practices.

David Irvine , Chairman of the Australian Cyber Security Research Institute, presents a gift to Bar-Ilan University President Rabbi Prof. Daniel Hershkowitz

The delegation explored technologies associated with

• online trading,
• physical security
• protection for high risk infrastructure and borders,
• surveillance,
• emergency management and
• remote business continuity.

The Arab world is a mess for at least the next 20-25 years,” predicted Prof. Efraim Inbar, Director of Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies, in concluding his analysis of the current situation in the Middle East before the delegation of Australians who started their weeklong with a visit to Bar-Ilan University.

Inbar was one of four speakers from the University to address the delegation.

Speaking of its rising power in the region, Inbar pointed out that Iran today maintains leadership in four main capitals aside from Tehran: Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sana.   And now that it has received “carte blanche” to build a nuclear bomb in 15 years, there is a trend towards nuclear proliferation.  Egypt and Turkey, who are competing for regional hegemony, will not remain behind, and neither, he guessed, will Saudi Arabia, which is directly threated by Iran.  “In order to counter the Iranians’ attempt at hegemony, they will do their best to acquire nuclear weapons,” he said.   

The United States, he added, has no credibility in the region and its offer of a nuclear umbrella to these countries was turned down.   Regarding Syria, Inbar said that it will never return to what it once was.  “You can turn an egg into an omelet, but you can never turn an omelet back into an egg,” said Inbar, who will be leading a delegation of BESA Center analysts to Australia later this year.  He added that he considers Turkey an Islamic State with a clear Islamist agenda being imposed, and he is not optimistic about the future there.

University President Rabbi Prof. Daniel Hershkowitz spoke about the importance of cyber security in Israel and at Bar-Ilan University in particular.  As Minister of Science, Technology and Space, Hershkowitz was asked by Prime Minister Netanyahu to form a national cyber headquarters in order to propel Israel into becoming one of the top five nations  in the world in this field.  The Prime Minister tapped Hershkowitz due to his extensive experience in IDF Intelligence and as a professor of mathematics.  Prof.  Hershkowitz praised Prof. Yehuda Lindell, an expert in cyber security at Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Computer Science, who is leading one of the five national cyber centers together with the national cyber headquarters.  He also spoke of the University’s unique Victor Bentata Mathematical Program for Gifted High School Students which enables the University to identify star math students and accelerate their study so that by the age of 18 they are just one year shy of obtaining a Bachelor’s degree.

David Irvine,  Chairman of the Australian Cyber Security Research Institute, thanked Hershkowitz for the intriguing analysis of what the University is doing in computer and cyber security research, as well as the situation in the Middle East.  Mr. Irvine is a former Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization and former Director-General of the Australian Intelligence Service.

Prof. Yehuda Lindell, a native Australian, briefed the delegation on the Cyber Security Center he heads at Bar-Ilan University which is comprised of a core group of cryptologists, artificial intelligence experts and hardware security engineers.   Prof. Lindell conducts pioneering work in cryptography, focusing on secure protocols. He grapples both with theoretical aspects of cryptography, striving to discover what is cryptographically possible, and with practical realities, constructing efficient cryptographic schemes and protocols with rigorous proofs of security and correctness.  The Bar-Ilan Cyber Security Center is one of the five National Cyber Centers.

What does the future hold where cyber security is concerned?  Prof. David Passig, an expert in future studies at the University’s Churgin School of Education told the delegation that he is working towards an understanding of how humans are developing technology and what is behind this endeavour, in addition to predicting what types of breakthroughs we may see in the next decade or two.  In order to do that, he is producing algorithms that can predict how patterns of threats are developing.  “We are trying to figure out what is driving us to develop, for instance, wireless technology.  With that driving force I can figure out what may happen even if there aren’t any examples from the past.  What is the driving force behind cyber threats?  We are at a stage where we have an insight as to what may be in store for us in the coming decade,” said Passig.