Joy Division attack is Sussan Ley’s knights-and-dames moment

3 months ago 8

The brouhaha about Anthony Albanese’s Joy Division T-shirt might just be the silliest moment in Australian politics since Tony Abbott brought back knights and dames in 2014.

For years, Sussan Ley has leaned into her days as a punk. It’s part of her rich backstory, which also includes stints as a farmer, a pilot, a shearer’s cook and an Australian tax office official before she entered politics.

Whatever happened to that worldly, punky version of Ley?

It wasn’t on show when Ley criticised Albanese’s decision to wear a shirt featuring the post-punk, late ’70s band Joy Division when he disembarked the prime ministerial plane after a successful meeting with Donald Trump last week.

She claimed the shirt had antisemitic connotations because the band took the name Joy Division from a term for sexual slavery brothels inside Nazi concentration camps. The shirt, she said, was insensitive to Jewish Australians at a time of rising antisemitism, and the prime minister should apologise for wearing it.

Never mind that biographies of the band have examined its members’ deep sympathy for the 6 million Jews who suffered and died through the Holocaust, and that one of the remaining band members has said they would not have chosen the name, selected as part of their fascination with the macabre, today.

Albanese, representing Australia in Malaysia at the ASEAN summit, wasn’t even in parliament when Ley launched her attack over the shirt.

But her comments opened the door to semi-serious questions, such as: Whether she was ever a fan of the punk band the Sex Pistols, who slammed the British monarchy as fascist? Did she ever listen to the Dead Kennedys?

In other words, overall, does she still believe in free speech?

Ley’s office declined to comment.

Her decision to criticise Albanese’s shirt matters because it has caused a growing number of Coalition MPs to privately question their leader’s judgment, just as many questioned Abbott’s after he unilaterally revived the anachronistic awards system.

On the same day Ley raised the issue in parliament – five days after the PM wore the shirt – the parent company of the Tomago aluminium smelter in NSW had warned it could shut because of rising power prices. That’s a serious issue that could cost jobs and a political gift to the opposition, who have been warning for years about power price rises under Labor.

So too is the government’s response to serious antisemitic attacks such as street harassment and firebombings. Months on from special envoy to combat antisemitism Jillian Segal releasing a report on the issue, the government has not formally implemented or rejected many of her ideas.

The opposition did focus on the smelter issue in question time, to be fair. But Ley’s shirtfronting of the absent prime minister, which echoed commentary on Sky News the night before, dominated the day, rather than Tomago.

Oppositions only get so much airtime in the daily media cycle. Ley and her experienced team know this.

Last week, the opposition leader ended up with egg on her face after she called for ambassador Kevin Rudd to be sacked after that wildly successful meeting with Trump. It was a ridiculous suggestion that colleagues were soon distancing themselves from.

It was the same again on Tuesday, as opposition frontbench MPs including Ted O’Brien, Bridget McKenzie, Tim Wilson and Angus Taylor were peppered with questions about whether they agreed with their leader’s T-shirt comments, rather than the issues of the day.

For the second week running, Ley and her team made the wrong call. And for a second week in a row, her colleagues either distanced themselves from her comments or struggled to defend them.

For an opposition leader who is cratering in the polls and who has lost two talented, albeit rebellious, frontbenchers in the past two months, that’s a problem.

Peter Dutton held the Coalition party together for three years with few outbreaks of disunity or policy rebellions, but it came at the cost of the opposition having a proper internal policy debate.

Ley wants that debate and is reviewing all the party’s policies, but that has a cost too – the opposition doesn’t stand for much of anything at the moment and MPs are frustrated about not having more to talk about. It has also opened the door to rebellion.

The opposition leader was once a co-convener of the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine group. She is now a firm ally of Israel. She believes that Australia must remain committed to net zero but struggles to say it, aware of how divisive the issue is in the Coalition.

The opposition leader has a credibility gap on these and other questions, and an authenticity problem too.

And if there was ever a guiding or unifying philosophy for punk music, it was about being authentic.

Ley would do well to remember that.

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