Hot Toilet Albo has lost the Gorman Belt

On Monday night, Sydney Palestinians and the anti-Zionist Jewish organisation the Tzedek Collective led a protest outside the Enmore Theatre. The headliner at the Enmore that night was Douglas Murray, the most recent D-grade grifter to build a career out of scaring brain-addled FOX/Sky News addicts into thinking that white people are being wiped out and that the Holocaust wasn’t as bad as we’re told.

As documented by protesters, the Enmore’s management responded by calling the police and blasting music from their external speakers to drown out the protest.

The Enmore has form in letting antisemites and Holocaust deniers book its space. In 2019 the theatre had to cancel a planned appearance by conspiracy theorist David Icke, the guy who believes the world is controlled by giant lizards and that Jews did the Holocaust, after the government cancelled his visa.

(Most Australian Jewish organisations came out in force to oppose Icke’s tour and applauded his visa being cancelled. That hasn’t happened with Murray, despite his atrocious antisemitism, because he’s also an enthusiastic supporter of Israel’s genocide against Gaza. The Australian Jewish News ran an extensive puff-piece interview with Murray in February, but didn’t find time to ask him about his 2023 remarks that Waffen SS commandos were “rarely proud of their average day’s work”.)

Besides being another exposé of the moral gormlessness of Australia’s arts establishment (maybe the protesters should have asked the Enmore to reject Murray on the grounds of “child and cultural safety”), the whole thing has crystallised some thoughts about Sydney’s inner west that have been rolling around in my head for a while. The inner west’s endlessly self-championed status as Sydney’s left-wing capital has taken plenty of hits in recent years, and not just because of the decades of gentrification that have made Erskineville the richest postcode in the country.

I promise this isn’t another moan about how the inner west isn’t good anymore from an elder Millennial because my cultural markers have aged out of relevance (the teens aren’t going to music festivals!!). I moved there when I was 18, and it was everything my hometown wasn’t. Seeing people openly do things like wear their hair in different ways or be gay without getting bashed blew my little Mid North Coast mind. It’s still that for a lot of people, even if the Sly Fox is gone.

But the Enmore debacle is the latest instance of an inner west establishment showing that the self-congratulatory leftie image it’s cultivated for years was only ever skin-deep. Gaza has exposed the ongoing crisis of what I’m calling vibes-based politics — the mushy, feel-good strain of do-nothing progressivism that peaked with Barack Obama in 2008 and has been the modern inner west’s guiding light.

Once upon a time, all you had to do to win loyalty from inner west punters was use organic food and share a rainbow flag post every once in a while. But the craft brewers and independent bookstores have shown themselves to be just as vicious as anyone else.

Beloved Newtown bookstore Better Read Than Dead was diligently putting books like Dark Emu and Talking to My Country in the display window while paying its workers so little they helped revive retail unionism. In 2018, the owners of iconic pubs the Henson and the White Cockatoo had to backpay their workers more than $100,000. The guys who started the Mary’s burger chain turned out to be vulture capitalists in wifebeaters. Sticky Fingers, the bucket hat-wearing car-commercial indie dipshits who used a band member’s family connections at the Australian to place a puff piece about how they were victims of cancel culture, filmed one of their first music videos up King Street.

The biggest local beneficiary of vibes-based politics, obviously, is Anthony Albanese, Grayndler’s MP and the inner west’s patron saint for 28 years; he of the Albo Pale Ales and the DJ sets and the excruciatingly fawning murals on toilet walls.

A lot of people have been wondering aloud how Albanese could go from giving speeches in Parliament about Palestine to what he’s doing now, as though he was once some starry-eyed idealist who’s been either corrupted or ground down by the system. But the signs were there to see for anyone who was paying attention. Back in 2011, he was writing op eds in The Australian calling the Inner West Council’s support for the BDS movement “misguided” because the Greens backed it.

The truth is he’s always been this way — a lifelong politician who’s cultivated a vague air of being progressive without committing to anything that would cost the Labor Party corporate donors or upset conservative media too much. It’s the ground beneath him that’s shifted. As people’s lives have gotten harder, they’ve become more aware of the endless ways in which the people who run the country and the world are profiting off their misery. When they turned to the places they were told to look for help, they found those places had no interest in helping them.

That’s why the former darling of Sydney’s Gorman belt now has a rolling protest outside his office that’s into its seventh week. On paper, Grayndler is one of the safest seats in the country — Albanese’s primary vote in 2022 was more than 53% — a margin of about 30,000 voters. But how many people in Grayndler are turning up to the Palestine rallies every week? How many have had their conception of Albanese and the system he represents turned on its head in the last few years?

I don’t know if Albanese will lose his seat at the next election, and I don’t think it’s something to hang all our hopes on. But it would be very funny, and very well deserved, if it did happen. It would be another nail in the coffin of vibes-based politics, which alone is something to strive for.

Fundraiser

We’ve raised more than $3,500 to get Noor Hammad, her husband and her bub out of Rafah! Thanks heaps to everyone who’s donated so far — if you find some more money down the back of the couch, no you didn’t it goes here now.

What I’m looking at

• Labor’s deportation bill will only create an endless roundabout between immigration detention and prison

• Why archaeologists must speak up for Gaza

• America’s far-right is pivoting from support for Israel to antisemitism, who could have seen this coming