'This is the list I've been given'

On Sunday, immigration and multicultural affairs minister Tony Burke hosted a large citizenship ceremony at Olympic Park. The ceremony was one of several around the country recently, at which around 12,500 people have become citizens.

@tonyburkemp

Why is Peter Dutton trying to make this a devise day? #auspol #auspolitics #politicaltiktok #fyp #australia #peterdutton #citizenship #welcomehome

Opposition leader Peter Dutton, Sky News and Liberal senators have accused Burke of trying to get thousands of new migrants on the electoral roll before the next election. Dutton singled out Palestinians at Sky’s deranged “antisemitism summit” last week, saying falsely that Labor was “[bringing] people in from a war zone without the requisite checks on a tourist visa” and that people were “[receiving] citizenship before the proper security checks have been undertaken”.

Obviously, all this is horseshit. There is no evidence of anyone, from anywhere, getting citizenship before having lawfully lived in Australia for at least four years. As Crikey’s Bernard Keane points out, the idea that left-wing political and social forces (include the Labor Party in this for argument’s sake) are engineering mass immigration for political ends is just the white supremacist Great Replacement conspiracy theory with a local flavour. Strangely, none of the “antisemitism summit’s” attendees have publicly raised concerns about that.

A weird side-effect of this made-up non-story is that an actual story got a lot more attention than it otherwise would have. The day of the citizenship ceremony in Olympic Park, I got a message from an attendee claiming that Burke had passed over mentioning Palestine while reading out a list of the new citizens’ home nations.

They also claimed that, when challenged on this by a member of the audience, Burke responded: “This is the list I’ve been given”.

Normally, a government minister pretending that Palestine doesn’t exist is not the kind of thing that most media outlets would run a story on. But because of the confected “Labor’s creating new immigrant voters” story, a tweet I posted on Sunday on the subject has been picked up by News Corp and Liberal senators as “evidence” that Tony Burke, of all people, is using citizenship ceremonies to smuggle divisions of the Al-Qassam Brigade into the country so they can vote Labor.

Yesterday I spoke further with the attendee, Giacomo Bianchino (disclaimer: I know Giacomo from this incredible band he’s in called Southend Rainbows), to find out more about what exactly happened. Giacomo went to the ceremony to see his girlfriend’s mum become a citizen. There were multiple ceremonies at Olympic Park that day, with each ceremony lasting about half an hour.

“The event was packed into a huge hangar at Olympic Park, and there were about 600 people getting their citizenship certificates,” he says. “On the screens there were QR codes for people to register to vote, and aides walking through the aisles reminding people to do so. There was definitely a sense of petty spectacle on the part of the Labor MPs and the whole thing did feel solicitous, but for the most part it was actually a pretty wholesome event.

“Tony Burke seemed to be playing the dorky oddball figure á la DJ Albo. He gave a short speech after a Welcome to Country and called on all the MPs in attendance — all Labor — to stand and wave to the people. Then he said he would read out all of the nationalities of the people who were there to receive citizenship. He encouraged people to cheer when they heard their country,” Giacomo says.

“After he finished he asked in a short and jocular way if he’d missed anyone. Somebody yelled out ‘Palestine’ and there was a cheer. He fumbled and became flustered and said ‘This is the list I’ve been given’ … he seemed genuinely rattled when called out about Palestine.”

Liberal Senator James Paterson grilled department of home affairs secretary Stephanie Foster about this at Senate estimates on Monday. Foster revealed that there were in fact people of Palestinian heritage at the citizenship ceremony — an admission Paterson pounced on, patchy-bearded dullard that he is, as though he’d found the smoking gun revealing that Labor and Hamas are secret pen pals.

It seemingly hasn’t occurred to Paterson, Dutton, Sky or the dozens of people in my Twitter mentions that there are, in fact, Palestinians who have lived in Australia for at least four years — in large part because Israel has been occupying and bombing their homeland for much longer than that — and who thus qualify for citizenship.

Foster also claimed that it was the Department, not Burke, that was to blame for his not mentioning Palestine. “[The lists of nationalities] were indeed provided by the department, and it was our error that Palestine was not included. It was not a deliberate omission on his part,” Foster said.

Given the last eighteen months, it would be an almighty coincidence if Palestine, of all places, was mistakenly left off a list of nationalities read out by the minister for multiculturalism.

Watching a story about the government’s refusal to even utter the word “Palestine” get co-opted into a right-wing scare campaign about Olympic Park’s hidden Labor-voting Hamas cell has made for a very weird few days. Besides the obvious conclusions to draw from all this — that Tony Burke apparently gets visibly flustered from hearing the word “Palestine”, and that watching James Paterson succumb to male-pattern baldness is going to be rough watching over the next few years — I’ll leave the last word to Giacomo:

“It does look like Labor is going to struggle to leave behind the Palestine question as they obviously want to, even if they are being totally mischaracterised as having a sense of basic human interest in the issue.”

Fundraiser for Noor and Hoor Hammad

Noor and her family have applied for passports, and soon will be applying for tourist visas to come to Australia. If you’ve got anything to spare, please consider giving some money so they can finally get out of Gaza.

Also, both Noor and her husband are qualified clinical nutritionists, and Noor’s English language skills are excellent. If you know of any work opportunities they could pursue in Australia, please reach out.

As this newsletter goes out, Noor’s birthday is in half an hour.

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