Anthony Albanese and Sussan Ley were once on a Palestine unity ticket

Here's a weird state of affairs. On an issue that is swinging a wrecking ball through institutions and communities across this country and indeed the democratic world, the leaders of Australia's two major parties are quiet co-occupants of a historic unity ticket.

Both Anthony Albanese and Sussan Ley are past convenors of the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine group, having joined it — or in Albanese's case, actively co-founded it — when they were backbenchers, more than two decades ago.

Both have expressly supported the recognition of Palestinian statehood.

Friends across the political spectrum

Albanese created the group in 1999 with Joe Hockey, who was at the time a new Liberal MP and a junior minister in John Howard's Coalition government.

Ley joined the Parliamentary Friends Of Palestine shortly after her election to the House of Representatives in 2001, having wrested the vast regional seat of Farrer from the National Party.

In 2003, she took on a leadership role, telling the Australian Jewish News: "For those of us who look forward to an independent Palestinian state and wish to advance the cause of viable sovereign statehood, this group gives us an opportunity to hold out the hand of friendship, understanding and trust."

In 2011, by which time she was a shadow minister in Tony Abbott's opposition, Ley told the parliament that she supported the Palestinian people's bid for recognition and membership of the United Nations.

On the question of Palestine, the position of the federal Labor Party is clear. In 2021, for the first time, the party's national conference voted not only to confirm its support for a two-state solution, but to "call on the next Labor government to recognise Palestine as a state", in a motion authored by then shadow foreign minister Penny Wong.

That next Labor government arrived at the 2022 election. Wong is now foreign minister. And now the opposition is led by someone who also is on parliamentary record as supporting Palestinian statehood. If you were an intelligent alien freshly landed from the Planet Zorb, you could be forgiven for thinking matters should be pretty straightforward from here, yes?

No. The rules of Australian political debate about Palestine — more than 12,000km away from Canberra and approximately seven ten-thousandths of our land mass — are much, much more complicated than that.

Not so straightforward

Labor senator Fatima Payman last year found this out the hard way, when she announced her intention to vote for a Greens Senate motion to recognise Palestine, citing the Labor platform's explicit position.

Payman is no longer a Labor senator. She is permanently estranged from her old party, an outcome that would cause our alien visitor to scratch its head, if that's indeed how intelligent life-forms from Zorb express puzzlement.

The best demonstration of how tangled and Byzantine this matter can become is obtained by zooming back in time to the minority government of Julia Gillard, the time frame in which Ley devoted a parliamentary speech to her support for Palestinian statehood.

Albanese, by this time the leader of the House, wrangling legislation day by day for a prime minister holding power by one vote, was publicly more circumspect, for good reason.

The status of a Palestinian state was by this time the nexus of a significant proxy war within Labor.

And a complex, multi-layered war it was, fought mostly below the public water line, but much muddied by related disputes, some of them ancient: factional divides between left and right, or within the right between NSW and Victoria. The ongoing bad blood between Gillard and the leader she deposed, Kevin Rudd, was an additional underwater hazard. By that time, Rudd was foreign minister, running a campaign for Australia to win a seat on the UN Security Council and pressing Gillard to distance the government from Israel.

Gillard was a supporter of Australia's alliance with Israel and despite nominally belonging to Labor's left faction, she was much more closely associated with elements of the right (Keep up, little alien. Don't lose focus!).

As Australian Union of Students leader in the early 1980s, Gillard was instrumental in quashing that organisation's activism for Palestine in the early 1980s, arguing that it "alienated the vast mass of students".

Bob Carr tries to persuade Julia Gillard

Australia won its bid for a seat at the Security Council in late 2012, by which time Rudd had quit as foreign minister and his replacement, former NSW premier Bob Carr, had taken over trying to talk Gillard out of voting against Palestine being given observer status at the UN.

"To feed my gloomy irritation I sustain another defeat at the hands of the Likudniks," reports Carr in a diary entry on November 12, 2012, using one of his terms for pro-Israel Labor colleagues (another is "felafel faction"). In the same entry, Carr moodily records that an attempt to "escape episodes of atrial fibrillation" by eliminating coffee from his diet had also failed, producing only lethargy and headaches. "To live is to lose ground."

But in a cabinet meeting on November 27 of that year, Carr and the majority of his cabinet colleagues erupted in rebellion against their prime minister.

Some were motivated by principle. Some by factional allegiance. Some by the demographics of their electorates. Some by their loyalty to Rudd. Either way, Gillard had only two cabinet voices defending her that day: Victorian right-wingers Stephen Conroy and Bill Shorten.

The upshot was that Gillard was forced to retreat from her position. Australia did not — as she'd earlier directed — vote against the motion affording Palestine observer status at the UN. Instead, we abstained.

The motion passed easily, with only a handful of nations opposed.

Australia's stance made no difference to the final result, but it nearly tipped Gillard out of the leadership. As it was, she lasted just another six months.

Incidentally, Carr — who remains Labor's most trenchant critic of Israel, and on Monday called on the government to recognise Palestinian statehood as soon as possible — way back in 1977 co-founded, along with Bob Hawke, the group Labor Friends of Israel.

What shifts the needle?

Ley, meanwhile, has had her past statements on Palestine used against her in internal backgrounding campaigns twice this year. First in January to frustrate her request for the foreign affairs portfolio, which as deputy Liberal leader she was well within her rights to demand in accordance with the tradition.

And again, less successfully, when she sought the leadership.

On Monday, Ley declared that she remained "a friend of the Palestinian people", but joined her colleagues in blaming Hamas for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the horror of which continues to deepen.

The prime minister, meanwhile, strengthened his criticism of Israel in a further incremental step towards adopting a position to which he has been bound in the simplest of terms since 2021.

Our visiting alien might well ask: "OK, so if binding policy positions and statements of principle aren't a reliable guide to outcomes, then what is it that shifts the needle?"

And the answer is: Usually, what shifts the needle is the degree of unspeakable suffering sustained by the innocent. Especially when they are children.

The dreadful images of October 7, terrified young people and children murdered and abducted. And then, the sickening images of starving children in Gaza.

It's the most depressing answer imaginable.