It was not that there were no legal tools to deal with antisemitism.

It was that, too often, Labor refused to use them.

There is an old fable, attributed to Aesop, about a scorpion and a frog. The scorpion asks the frog to carry him across a river. The frog hesitates, fearing a sting, but the scorpion points out that if he stings the frog, they will both drown. Mid-river, the scorpion strikes. As they sink, the frog asks, ‘Why?’ and the scorpion replies, ‘It is in my nature.’

In recent years, Anthony Albanese has affected a comfortable centrism, muting not so much the radicalism of his student-politics days but rather his long attachment to Labor’s authoritarian hard-left faction to which he says he will eventually return.

It is his true nature.

Above all, he understood that a ‘hard-left’ ideologue is unlikely to become prime minister.

Perhaps this explains why, under the present Prime Minister, the country seems to be going backwards.

The view from the Lodge seems to be that, provided his hard-left ideology prevails, no one should be concerned about the cost of living, that electricity, once among the cheapest in the world, is now among the most expensive, that housing is beyond the reach of most, or that the country is left defenceless. Or indeed, that Australia has long been in the grip of antisemitism.

But in the wake of the Bondi Beach tragedy – a crisis his own government’s tolerance of extremism helped foster – the mask has slipped just as it did at the Opera House in 2023, when the toleration of antisemitism rose to levels never known before.

Mr Albanese will occasionally reveal his authoritarian hard-left nature, as he did in refusing a royal commission for so long, no doubt fearing it would expose his role in the increased toleration of Jew-hatred.

Only the naïve would have been surprised when, after finally being forced to agree to a royal commission, we were told he had been ‘secretly planning’ one all along.

The view was recently expressed in the Australian that Mr Albanese simply does not understand the problem of antisemitism.

The truth is darker: along with many in the current Labor caucus, he understands it far too well.

As identified by the late Labor eminence Barry Cohen, antisemitism has been rampant in the Labor party for decades.

Too many policies – from law enforcement to immigration and even foreign affairs – have been designed to accommodate this ‘tolerance’, reaching a crescendo over the last two years.

This is not well known because too many in the modern mainstream media agree with it.

Facing a backlash that threatens Labor’s hold on key seats, the leadership opted for a ‘distraction’ through the ragtag Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill, 2026.

That even this parliament would ‘roll over’ and pass this virtually without debate was delusional; eventually, the hard-left speech-gagging core of the bill was dropped.

To repeat, the reason for the current level of antisemitism was never a lack of law.

It is that the Albanese government – and its satellite New South Wales government – tolerated it to the extent of unlawfully and deliberately not using existing laws and police powers to protect Jewish Australians.

(The NSW ‘satellite’ government has long appeared to act on the instructions of the Albanese government. Take immigration, now far beyond the state’s capacity and needs, particularly in the capital. At the current rate, a city of five million will swell to over eight million by 2050. The impact on schools, hospitals, housing, and even water prices is already extremely serious. A premier would have once denounced Canberra, threatening serious action. Instead, Mr Minns is working out how to fit the population into high-rise shoe-box slums.)

Returning to Mr Albanese’s ‘emergency’: this was political theatre designed to bulldoze the now-abandoned 100-page bill through a ludicrously inadequate window for scrutiny.

It revealed a hard-left attempt to impose the most draconian anti-speech laws in our history, coupled with immigration controls the government already largely enjoys and an unnecessary, massive gun buyback estimated by the Shooting Industry Foundation of Australia to cost between $15 and $20 billion.

Labor already had the power to proscribe all terrorist groups but has declined to do so.

As to immigration, they have been shockingly indifferent as to whether or not they were importing extremism, witnessed by disguised immigration from Gaza – not admissible in almost all Arab nations – and the return of notorious Isis brides.

The omnibus bill was to serve three purposes.

First, to maintain the fiction that the government’s hands were tied before Bondi.

Second, to ‘box in’ the royal commission before it could conclude that previous inaction was unlawful.

And third, to advance the long-term hard-left aim to turn Australia into an authoritarian state.

To confirm that the legislation was, in its fundamental aspect, irrelevant to ending antisemitism, it contained a perfect way out for terrorist-supporting clerics, a religious text defence.

If anything, this indicates Mr Albanese was using this as a wedge.

While a secular citizen could have faced five years in jail for questioning immigration policy, a preacher quoting a call to violence would remain protected.

International experts sounded the alarm, with US Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers warning the law was ‘deeply perverse’, providing ‘safe harbour’ to extremists while imprisoning critics.

UK Independent Reviewer Jonathan Hall KC warned that ‘legislating by tragedy’ would stifle debate without stopping terror.

The goal was never safety; it was a hard-left tool to gag Australians.

While few will not be surprised if it is one day revived, most fair observers were horrifed that while the bill could gag rank-and-file Australians criticising out-of-control immigration, radical Islamism would actually thrive in the shadows of the religious exemption.

Australians must realise that the ‘Albo’ who drinks beer at the footy is not the man in the Lodge.

Mid-river, we have seen the sting come – and fortunately, for now, it has been withdrawn