“Social coherence” is being invoked everywhere, but public trust is fraying. Political panic, rushed laws and weak leadership are deepening division, not repairing it.

The time may have come to retire the phrase “social coherence”. One hardly ever heard of it a few years ago, but as Australian society seems to be atomising by the hour, it is on everyone’s lips. Including those who might seem to be doing most to defeat in public any idea of a common good, national and social identity, and decency and tolerance towards all. The more I hear of it, the less I see.

It is quite true that the phrase seems to contain the germ of what might seem to be a good idea – a nation building and affirming ideal – but on many of the occasions it is trotted out, it seems, in practice, to be achieving the very opposite. As a political idea, its main problem is that many of those most given rhetorically to talking about the need to build social coherence are not very good at making it happen. The fact that intentions were noble doesn’t come into it. Take Anthony Albanese, for example. Included among his social cohesion triumphs are the Aboriginal Voice, a very popular idea for a moment until it severely divided Australians and was humiliatingly defeated. Then, after 30 years of wasted time in action against climate change Albanese got through parliament legislation he claimed had ended the argument once and for all. Now he is again back to taws, with the opposition firmly against emission targets and firmly focused against what most observers regard as a bare minimum national interest. Government is going backwards.

On defence policy, particularly in the past six months of Donald Trump, we have not had unity or social coherence. Or intelligibility, consistency and relationship to our national circumstance. The minister for defence. Richard Marles has his own incoherence problem and seems to think that the reason for blind support of Trump is the international need for rules-based order, as though America provides that. Perhaps Albanese and Penny Wong have reasons they cannot disclose for adopting a slavish defence and foreign policy, increasingly against Australia’s interests in relation to China. But they have failed to explain and justify it to the nation. Nor to reassure Australians who doubt that either the US or the UK can fulfil their nuclear promises over the next 40 years, leaving a serious risk that Australia will have no submarines at all.

Albanese badly mismanaged Australia’s response to the October 2023 massacre in Israel and its prompt embarkation on a disproportionate war against the citizens of Gaza. For too long he failed to listen to public opinion about the size of the slaughter being visited on the people of Gaza, Israeli actions in withholding food and limiting medical and other services. For too long it has seemed to juggle the “problem” or the issue as being one of empathy with Israel and its problems in confronting terrorism. Albanese eventually joined Canada, Britain and most of western Europe in criticising Israel’s war (which international courts had suggested to be genocide and involve war crimes) and in supporting Palestine’s case for nationhood. But he and many of his colleagues always seem to see the conflicts through Israeli eyes, at best adopting the perspective of many Israeli citizens critical of prime minister Netanyahu and his method of prosecuting the war and what now passes for peace.

Critics have been targeting Israel, the IDF and Netanyahu, not Jewishness or Jews. That’s not antisemitic.

Israel’s conduct of the war led to an avalanche of local and international criticism. The overwhelming proportion of that........

© Pearls and Irritations