Is it possible that New South Wales State Premier Chris Minns is secretly a strong supporter of justice for the beleaguered residents of war-torn Gaza?
This is a radical idea, given that Minns is facing censure from his own caucus after trying to stop and stymie the wildly successful Sydney Harbour Bridge March for Palestine on Saturday.
And especially after his government has done everything possible to stifle public criticism of Israel over its ongoing persecution of residents of its Occupied Territories.
Given his comments this week, in which he finally expressed sympathy for the horrors inflicted on the entrapped residents of the Gaza Strip, could he really be using reverse psychology to build support for their plight? What Independent Australia describes as a sort of “Gaza Streisand effect” (more on that shortly).
Or has he, as certain reportedly “dismayed” MPs from the Labor Party told the Guardian this week, been ‘… more attuned to the News Corp media and talkback radio than his own party’ and is now trying to cautiously backpedal?
Whatever his intent, support for justice in Palestine in NSW does not appear to have been hampered by Minns’ actions in any way whatever. Quite the reverse.
CHRIS MINNS AND HIS "SOFT LEFT" RIGHT
The difficulty in working out what NSW Premier Chris Minns is, is that he is a bundle of contradictions.
Since narrowly edging the Labor Party back into Government in 2023, after 16 years in opposition, Minns has uniformly adopted conservative positions on a range of issues.
For instance, he has called for less union influence in the Labor Party, acted to stop pay rises above three per cent for lowly paid health workers, and brought in punitive bail laws for youth offenders.
It has caused internal tensions in his own party and not only among the Left faction.
As a Right faction MP was reported as saying this week:
“They haven’t come out on any progressive issues. It’s been us – the right – and some of the soft left that have been raising it, and now the base is really unhappy.”
But it's Minns’ controversial antisemitism legislation and heavy clampdown on protests in support of Palestine that he has received most national attention.
In February this year, the Minns Government described Police finding a caravan laden with explosives a terrorist plot and several graffiti attacks on synagogues “as disgusting acts of racial hatred and antisemitism”, using the incident to rush through a suite of draconian laws, including reinforcing hate-speech laws and giving police the power to prevent protests near synagogues.
In March, police found the caravan and 14 other antisemitic incidents across Sydney were a “con-job” conducted by organised crime, not driven by antisemitism at all. Minns has refused calls to reverse the laws, despite even the Prime Minister saying he had known it was a hoax for “some time”. This led to condemnation by human rights lawyers, his own MPs, a legal challenge and ongoing calls for an inquiry, pushing Minns into a national notoriety he had not seen since becoming Premier.
Until this month, that is, when he tried to stop Gazan activists marching across the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
MINNS AND THE STREISAND EFFECT
Minns has been a seeming supporter of Israel for “some time”. At least since 2003, when as an inaugural graduate of the Ramban Israel Fellowship Programme, he joined a political delegation to the Holy Land funded by powerful lobby group AIPAC. Of course, this is far from unusual; a plethora of politicians from all sides have accepted the largesse of Israel and its supporters.
IA says “seeming” because his recent acts as Premier have catapulted the ongoing tragedy unfolding in the former Palestine into the spotlight in a way publicists could hardly imagine. Minns, after all, was astute enough to lead Labor back from the wilderness– albeit in a minority government – after the Coalition had run NSW for the better part of two decades. Surely, he must be aware of the “Streisand effect”.
The Streisand effect is a digital age term, coined after entertainer Barbara Streisand tried to suppress publication of a photo of her Malibu home in 2003. At the time, the picture had only been downloaded six times, including twice by her own lawyers. Public awareness of the case showed the photo had been viewed 420,000 times by the following month.
Could Chris Minns be cannily attempting to draw attention to what the International Court of Justice and many others have described as a “genocide” by trying to ban protests on the matter?
Because many fewer people would have heard about the march across the Harbour Bridge if the Minns Government and his police had not tried to stop it. Hence what IA has dubbed the “Gaza Streisand effect”.
In the media storm following the Supreme Court decision to permit the protest, an estimated 90,000 to 300,000 people defied bitter weather, armed riot police trying to divert them and even skywriting telling them to go away, to trek across the Bridge. It was perhaps the biggest protest ever seen on the famous landmark, as well as almost certainly the most peaceful.
As Justice Belinda Rigg said in her judgment:
“The march at this location is motivated by the belief that the horror and urgency of the situation in Gaza demands an urgent and extraordinary response from the people of the world.”
Sometimes the system works.
The only way the protest could have been bigger may have been if the judge had decided to prohibit the march. Did Chris Minns know this? Is he a closet humanitarian?
After all, after the last sodden protester had left the vicinity, he did say what Israel was doing in Gaza was a “massive concern”. Although he then ruled out banning similar marches in the future.
It may be, sadly, that he is more in touch with the audience of Sky News and 2GB than he is with the vast majority of Australians who support truth, fairness and peace. And who are not in the slightest bit antisemitic.
Follow Dave Donovan on X/Twitter @davrosz and Bluesky @davrosz.bsky.social, and Independent Australia on Bluesky @independentaus.bsky.social, X/Twitter @independentaus and Facebook HERE.
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