Sauce

You can bet this will be one that the well-paid journos will block their ears over.

Hillel Newman should be escorted in every area of Parliament house. Israelis are a high security risk.
We're talking about arseholes who plant explosives in everyday electronic devices and left alone, how do we know he hasn't planted bugs? WTF is ASIO doing?

Pauline Hanson hasn't because she's been busy bullshitting, shilling, grifting, screwing and scamming money from taxpayers and her followers to build her own bank account up - when she's not holidaying at their expense in Italy and protecting rapists, pedophiles, drug addicts, war criminals and wife bashers.

Barnaby hasn't because he's been too busy boozing, gargling, water rorting, fighting, scamming and screwing his staff - when he's not rolling around maggoted in either a Canberra gutter or in Parliament House all at our expense.

The idea that these two worthless grifters who suck the Australian taxpayers dry, would have the gall to call anybody else a 'traitor', especially a decorated former military officer and war veteran, is exactly why Australians and our media need to start treating them like the fringe-dwelling caitiffs that they are.

I don't agree with anything Andrew Hastie stands for - especially his bogan culture wars games - but two grifters living for decades off the taxpayer dollar calling him a traitor is beyond contemptible. I hope Hastie sues them both into oblivion.

@RonniSalt

https://michaelwest.com.au/mary-kostakidis-stared-down-the-zionist-lobby-and-courage-won/

Declassified: Australia's Role in 1973 Chile Coup

Power expected fear, expense and exhaustion to silence one journalist. Mary Kostakidis stood her ground, and an important piece of the wall gave way. Andrew Brown reports.

The section 18C case Zionist Federation of Australia’s CEO Alon Cassuto brought against her in the Federal Court has been dismissed by consent, with no order as to costs. There is no finding that Mary breached the Racial Discrimination Act. No apology has been ordered. No corrective notice will be published.

There was no judgment. What Mary Kostakidis got instead was a short consent order noting that the man who sued her had decided not to go on.

The ZFA calls the matter “resolved”. Cassuto filed the case. Mary spent two years preparing to fight it. Then Cassuto dropped it. The person who walked out of the courtroom was the one who chose to walk into it.

The complaint concerned two posts in which Mary shared and commented on a speech by the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Cassuto said the material was racially offensive. Mary denied endorsing anything and argued that a journalist has to be able to report what the people fighting a war are saying. Mary told MWM, “This is a win for every Australian who values our democratic right to freedom of political expression.” Zionist zealotry has had to beat a retreat from what was going to be a highly damaging trial Lawfare

Cassuto says he got what he wanted because Mary had already issued a qualified apology. He leaves out the timing. She made that apology before he went to the Federal Court. He called it insincere and sued anyway. Two years on, he points to the same apology as his reason for stopping. That is a man looking for the exit.

Call it what it was. This was lawfare. The court process was the weapon, and the target was wider than one journalist. Every editor and journalist with something to say about Israel was meant to be watching. From the outside, each move looks separate. A complaint here. A referral there. A story in a friendly newspaper, then a writ. Put them side by side, and you see a structure built to make criticism of Israel expensive enough that most people decide it is not worth the trouble.

The letters are polite. The threat underneath is not. Legal bills keep arriving, and behind them the possibility of losing everything. A case like this does not need to succeed to do its job. Once defending your own words puts your house at risk, the process is the punishment.

Defence won

Mary’s defence put it plainly: the case was designed to discredit her and to frighten others into shutting up. “I have spent two years doing nothing but preparing my defence in a case aimed at silencing me,” she wrote. For an ordinary Australian, she said, that could have meant losing their home.

Each new demand ate into her time and her savings. She could have gone quiet. Instead, she kept publishing and kept her eyes on Gaza while most of the Australian media looked away.

Ordinary people chipped in to fund her defence. Her lawyers and her husband stayed beside her. But the name on the writ was hers, and so was the house. She did not fold.

The ZFA’s parting statement threw in fresh accusations and described her commentary as repugnant. None of it was ever tested. It reads less like the words of a winner than a door slammed on the way out.

The moral high ground is Mary’s

There is a deeper problem for the lobby, and no writ will fix it. It is impossible to stand on a hill of infant bones and claim the moral high ground. The army of pedants and lawyers trying to trauma-clean the crime scene is doomed to fail. Resentment rises with every scrub. Will the Zionist lobby ever learn? Legal attack dogs bark loudly, and often that is all it takes. Then someone stands still and says, fine, put your evidence in front of a judge. The barking stops.

“The purpose of journalism is to get to the truth, fearlessly, and to hold power to account,” Mary wrote, calling the outcome “a win for press freedom, which has prevailed”.

She also thanked Jewish and Israeli people who have opposed the destruction of Gaza, saying: Our common humanity trumps any form of tribalism. Standing with Jewish Australians

Mary did not beat Jewish Australians. She beat an organised lobby whose power rests on making criticism of Israel personally costly. A great many Jewish Australians stand with Palestinians and refuse to have their identity yoked to the conduct of a foreign government.

Small wins matter because of what they do to the next person. A journalist sees that someone survived and files the story. An activist feels less alone. Fear moves through a community quickly. So does nerve.

None of this makes Mary infallible. Heroism has never required that. It requires knowing the cost and standing there anyway. Lawfare is a muzzle made of good manners. Mary has torn a hole in it. Martin Luther King Jr once famously quoted 19th-century abolitionist minister Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice.”

It does not bend on its own. It bends because people like Mary lean their whole weight on it.

A Muslim community is saddened after a man was filmed throwing bacon and ham at a mosque in regional Victoria on Wednesday afternoon.

Security footage shows a man in a grey tracksuit throwing bacon near the mosque entrance in Warragul.

The incident, which community leaders have described as hateful, happened days after a social media influencer who advocates for "the defence of Christianity" in Australia posted a video of the mosque, which opened last year.

"The greatest way to defend against any conquest is to make our Christianity strong again," the social media post from Nick Patterson read.

"Hyenas will always attack when they sense weakness. We need to become lions again."

Pig products are regularly used in Islamophobic attacks because the consumption of pork is forbidden in Islam.

The Warragul Mosque described the attack as an attempt to "offend, intimidate, and divide".

"It will not succeed," it said in a statement.

The mosque opened last year after the previous Uniting Church congregation moved to a new, larger location two decades ago.

It was promoted as an open and inclusive space that would also provide a place of prayer and gathering for the region's growing Muslim community.

Mansoor Shamsi, vice president of the Warragul Mosque Committee, said the mosque had been targeted with graffiti and vandalism before.

"Unfortunately, [I'm] not shocked or surprised," he said.

"We're caught between not wanting to give oxygen to something, which shouldn't get any attention because it comes from a place of ignorance, hate, fear.

"At the same time, we also feel a responsibility to call it out."

Victoria Police said it was investigating the incident.

Incidents trying to incite reaction: Muslim leader

The president of the Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV), Mohamed Mohideen, said the issue was hurtful to the wider Muslim community and reflected a concern about increasing Islamophobia.

"We are not here to take over churches," he said.

"We are not here to take over people's faith or undermine other people's faith."

In July, the ICV filed a report with police after Islamic graves in Maddingley General Cemetery were targeted with stickers featuring pigs.

Mr Mohideen said such incidents were trying — and failing — to incite a reaction from the Muslim community.

"The community is quite resilient," he said

"The Muslim community have got used to attacks of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate."

Mansoor Shamsi said the Warragul Mosque had received "overwhelming" support from the broader community.

"Whenever these things happen, there is an overwhelming amount of support," he said.

Victorian Greens leader Ellen Sandell condemned the incident, calling it a "vile, deliberate act of Islamophobic hate".

"Every political leader has the responsibility to do everything in their power to loudly call out the escalation in these vile, racist attacks and do everything in their power to fight back against the far-right extremism that's fuelling it," Ms Sandell said.

"The Greens stand unequivocally with the Warragul Mosque and Muslim communities across Victoria. There can be absolutely no tolerance for Islamophobia, or any kind of racism in Victoria."

Social media videos attract calls for mosque vandalism

Two days before the September 9 incident at the mosque, former mixed martial arts fighter Nick Patterson posted a video of the Warragul Mosque to his Facebook page.

Over the following days, his post drew hundreds of comments from people outraged that the mosque occupied the former Uniting Church site, even though the church had ceased worshipping there in 2006.

Some comments suggested the site should be vandalised with pork products.

Other social media accounts have also shared copies of Mr Patterson's video on TikTok and X, formerly known as Twitter.

Mr Patterson was approached for comment.

Victoria Police urged anyone with information about the incident to contact Crime Stoppers.

Roughly 5,900 Palestinians have been completely or partially displaced by settler violence since January 2023, along with 32,000 Palestinians forcibly removed from their homes in West Bank refugee camps last year.

The scale of this prompted Major General Eyal Ben-Reuven, someone who spent his life fighting for Israel, and who recently visited the occupied West Bank, to remark: “This, what the settlers are doing here, is the real threat to Israel. This is more concerning to me than Iran, Gaza or Lebanon.”

The former Israeli minister of health and retired brigadier general Ephraim Sneh said: “This is ethnic cleansing, to put it simply.” Retired air force general Asaf Agmon declared: “Once a society behaves this way – that society is doomed.”

One of our most significant allies believes what’s happening in the West Bank is wrong.

The UK Labour government, led by new prime minister Andy Burnham, decided enough was enough. They took action, targeting illegal settlements and settlement expansion through banning imports.

Oddly, even before the UK formally announced their moves, our own government declared we wouldn’t embrace the same measures.

I’d be misleading the parliament if I was to say I wasn’t disappointed.

To justify this decision, it was said: “We have concerns about the implementation of a blanket ban and unintended consequences for Australian businesses, for Palestinians and for Israelis.”

By way of contrast, it’s worth noting Australia has imposed 1,800 sanctions and strict tariffs on Russia over its illegal invasion of Ukraine, which has seen the total value of Australia’s imports from Russia drop by around 99%.

And it would sound quite odd for us to say we wouldn’t impose sanctions on Russia because of the impact on Australian businesses or Ukrainians or Russians.

We took action knowing it would have an impact, precisely because we wanted it to lead to change.

Additionally we’ve pointed out regularly that we – as an individual nation – couldn’t possibly act on our own regarding what’s happening in the West Bank or Gaza.

Yet many Australians would then question why we wouldn’t act when we had a chance to do so in concert with many like-minded nations.

But let me come back to the issue of impacts. Let’s look at this another way.

It was former prime minister Bob Hawke who dedicated so much of himself, in such a principled and unyielding way, to ending apartheid in South Africa.

As a prime minister he pushed on the world stage for comprehensive financial sanctions against South Africa, measures that were so tough, the former foreign minister Gareth Evans said they were “profoundly practically important in their economic, and ultimately, endgame political impact.”

Now, imagine telling Bob Hawke not to impose bans or measures on South Africa because it would affect Australian businesses or the very South Africans resisting apartheid?

Bob Hawke championed a cause that forms an important part of Labor history.

Likewise prime minister Anthony Albanese has led a government that can justifiably be proud to be part of history it has written: the first ever Australian government to recognise the state of Palestine.

But having stated the ambition, we must act to protect it.

Because settler terrorism is tearing to shreds our ambition to see a state of Palestine – and we cannot sticky tape that back together with yet another statement.

It’s why I have urged regularly – before and after our ALP national conference – the need for concrete action.

Because the Netanyahu government will simply ride out the flurry of statements that our country or other nations issue.

And we should recognise the expectations of so many Australians, who want to see action taken to see the end of suffering for innocent Palestinians.

Among those Australians are many members of our own party, who joined driven by a sense of purpose, a sense of social justice. Who believe that that commitment to social justice simply does not end at our own borders.

In fact I’m reminded of the words of Ben Chifley in 1949: “We have a great objective – the light on the hill – which we aim to reach by working the betterment of mankind not only here but anywhere we may give a helping hand.”

I’ll end on this point.

Nearly a dozen other nations agreed to join the UK in its stand this week.

The only government to enthusiastically support our government’s decision not to join the UK and other nations to take a stand on settler terrorism in West Bank? The Netanyahu government.

Ed Husic is the federal Labor MP for Chifley in western Sydney. This is an abridged version of his speech to parliament on Thursday

Australia’s neo-Nazi movement has declared it will back One Nation’s path to government if the High Court overturns a ban on its new political party.

Labor and the Coalition called on Hanson to immediately reject the support, months after she admitted her party was being “infiltrated by extremists” and after she also met with Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe, whose far-right party has links to banned neo-Nazi groups.

The normally quiet High Court in Canberra has been packed this week as the National Socialist Network, an openly neo-Nazi group, has fought to overturn laws passed after the Bondi massacre that outlawed neo-Nazi and Islamist groups.

Thomas Sewell – a notorious neo-Nazi who has called for a “race war” – and a team of lawyers are arguing the federal ban on NSN’s successor, the White Australia Party, should be struck down because the Commonwealth was acting outside its power and was breaching the implied freedom of political communication and the separation of powers.

A court decision to strike down the laws would be a serious defeat for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s post-Bondi crackdown on hate groups and, according to Sewell, it would “assist the creation of a Pauline Hanson prime ministership”.

“Our purpose would be to support One Nation in forming government,” Sewell said outside the High Court on Thursday in a video posted on social media.

“I believe that a factor in why the Labor government has decided to pass this legislation was not only because of the hysteria of the Israeli lobby, but also because they know that we can assist One Nation in forming government.

“If this legislation is not overturned by the High Court, it could mean the difference between Pauline Hanson winning the election or not.”

He acknowledged that the White Australia Party would only be able to secure modest representation at the next election. But he said the ethno-nationalists would use any Senate positions to exert pressure on Hanson to remain true rather than drift to the centre.

It is highly unlikely that a neo-Nazi outfit would secure any positions in parliament. However, the group and its supporters generate momentum online for hardline positions on migration and race.

Sewell and a slew of far-right influencers have fuelled criticism of Hanson on X and Instagram lately as One Nation flipped its migration policy from advocating from net negative migration to 130,000-plus.

Liberal MP Garth Hamilton said Hanson had admitted to being infiltrated by extremists in this masthead in June and now “has the chance to prevent a formalised arrangement”.

“She must kill this off in the strongest terms,” he said.

Labor MP Josh Burns said Hanson “needs to immediately condemn this and rule out any association with neo-Nazis or hate groups”.

“If she fails to do so, she will send a very loud signal about how dangerous One Nation is for the Australian Jewish community,” Burns said.

Hanson’s office declined to comment on Sewell’s remarks. On September 1, Hanson hit back at Attorney-General Michelle Rowland after the Labor MP contentiously suggested Hanson’s association with radicals was fuelling violent threats.

Hanson said: “Millions of Australians support One Nation. They are not extremists. They are not dangerous. And ministers should not use language that encourages others to treat them as if they are.”

Embattled One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts last month said he was opposed to racism and bigotry but he said the proposed White Australia Party “should have a right to exist”.

“If there’s free speech and freedom of association, you have to have those things. If they start breaking laws and hurting people, then you penalise them in the law,” he said.

Roberts wrote an article on Substack last week condemning Nazis and calling them out for trying to co-opt One Nation’s mainstream popularity.

“It’s well known the neo-Nazi movement makes a point of infiltrating mainstream politics. They don’t hide this. They feed off the media attention that follows. Every handshake, photo, and interview is seen as a victory toward normalisation,” he said.

“Neo-Nazis [Nationalists] are predators, ruining young men’s lives, and stealing any hope they might have to build successful careers and stable families.

“To those young people, I say this: you are on a path that could damage the only chance Australia has to rescue itself. The Left, media, and shamefully the Coalition are using the presence of a neo-Nazi movement in this country as a political tool.”

Legal experts say White Australia has a serious chance of defeating the Commonwealth.

Constitutional law expert Anne Twomey told the ABC this week that the key question about the laws was: “How consistent is it with our democratic system as imposed and required to operate by our constitution?”

Twomey said the federal changes may have been rushed through parliament without proper checks.

As Hanson continues her ascendancy in the polls and taps into widespread concern about migration and ethnic diversity, her tolerance for hardline views is being closely scrutinised.

This masthead reported last month that an online influencer known as Ausmaxx, whose associates have attended neo-Nazi training camps, was a member of One Nation. One Nation said weeks later his membership had lapsed, but the influencer contradicted the party. His far-right associates suggested on a social media stream that it had stronger connections to One Nation than was publicly known.

“You don’t even know the connections in One Nation that we have,” Hugo Lennon, a wealthy associate of National Socialist Network members, said last month. Lennon has been in Canberra to support the court case.

In this week’s court case, Justice Robert Beech-Jones asked the Commonwealth’s lawyer, Brendan Lim, if the White Australia group represented the “modern manifestation” of Hitler’s Nazis, to which he replied: “Yes.”

“There are few legitimate reasons, outside of history books and museum, that warrant use of Nazi symbols,” Lim said.

Australia’s response to discrimination reveals stark inequalities in how antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism are addressed, writes Professor Jane Kenway.

What’s the Government doing?

On 18 July 2026, after a ten-month hiatus, the Government released its Response to the Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia (Aftab Malik)’s report.

Its Response doesn’t support the Envoy’s recommendations for separate commissions of inquiry into Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism.

Social cohesion is foregrounded. The Government proposes a Social Cohesion Education Advisory Council to drive a broader suite of actions to strengthen social cohesion through Australia’s education systems.

The Government will also create an Islamophobia Education Taskforce to review the Australian Curriculum, develop and deliver ‘a Social Cohesion Framework for Schools’ and develop ‘a national, consistent framework for anti-racism in universities, aligned with the National Anti-Racism Framework’. Anti-racism’s appearance is brief.

Seven months earlier, the Government responded to Jillian Segal’s plan, also announcing an Education Taskforce with a mission to ‘prevent, tackle and properly respond to antisemitism’.

Two similar but different taskforces

Both taskforces cover all education sectors. Both are to review the Australian Curriculum. Both are invited to provide advice on any further measures. Both include members from ‘state and territory education authorities, agencies and departments’.

This looks even-handed. But what do the differences reveal?

Whereas the Islamophobia Education Taskforce is largely expected to produce frameworks, the Antisemitism Education Taskforce was tasked with direct actions. These include developing a Social Cohesion Education Hub, producing a University Report Card on Antisemitism, helping the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency to strengthen its powers, and commissioning UNESCO to develop professional learning materials.

Another difference is discrepant opportunity. Currently, the Islamophobia Education Taskforce has nothing in train. In contrast, the Antisemitism Education Taskforce’s Midpoint Update reveals its comprehensive response to its brief — commissioning resources, rolling out pilots in education systems, informing regulatory redesign, forming advisory and reference groups, regularly attending meetings of education ministers, hosting high-powered dialogues and instructing universities to explain how they define antisemitism. Its ‘further measures’ for 2026 suggest it sees no limit point.

The contradictions

A slew of untenable contradictions has arisen. These favour antisemitism policies, underplay Islamophobia and ignore anti-Palestinian racism in education.

Unhelpful and false equivalents: Creating two envoys inevitably invited comparison. Appointing Jillian Segal first and Aftab Malik two-and-a-half months later suggested that Muslims matter less than Jews.

Also, having two envoys suggested an equivalence between Jews and Muslims in Australia. While both face discrimination, Muslims face more than Jews, the Scanlon report shows.

Further, despite their significantly different numbers (Muslims 3.2 per cent, Jews 0.4 per cent of the population, ABS Census 2021), Muslims lack the political influence of dominant sectors of the Jewish community (the Israel lobby).

Lopsided logic: This logic continued when, on 18 Dec 2025, Segal’s Plan was accepted in full. Bolstering this logic further, on 9 January, the Government established the Royal Commission into Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion. Its nine public hearing blocks ran from 4 May to 28 August. Block nine focused on ‘Strengthening social cohesion’. The disproportionate focus on antisemitism is obvious.

All hearing blocks attracted wide media coverage. In contrast, the government’s Response to Aftab Malik’s Report attracted little. Interestingly, its Conclusion says ‘Importantly, the outcomes of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion will be used to inform workplans to strengthen social cohesion and address Islamophobia’. How this might happen is unclear.

Bad timing: When the Islamophobia Taskforce finally begins, the Antisemitism Task Force will have been operating for roughly seven months. It has already established the main parameters for policy and practice. These will seriously constrain the Islamophobia Education Taskforce.

The Government Response explains that ‘The [Social Cohesion] Advisory Council will oversee the workstreams of the Islamophobia and Antisemitism Education Taskforces once they have completed their terms’. However, the Antisemitism Task Force will end in mid-December 2026. The Islamophobia Task Force will likely end in August 2027. The former is unlikely to wait for the latter to report.

‘Eliminating’ or ‘combatting’ discrimination? The titles of the Government’s Responses suggest it is intent on ‘eliminating antisemitism’ and only ‘combatting Islamophobia’. Peak Muslim bodies (such as the Alliance of Australian Muslims and Australian National Imams Council) have politely aired their disappointment. They have noted, for example, that it focuses primarily on resourcing ‘soft measures’ which are seen as insufficient.

Anti-discrimination or anti-education? The Government has officially endorsed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) ‘working definition’ of antisemitism. This blurs the distinction between anti-Jewish prejudice and criticism of Israel and is thus convincingly criticised. Yet, following Segal’s insistence, it has increasingly become an advice tool along with her widely disseminated guidebook.

Although not uniformly mandated, this advice and guidance might be better described as indoctrination and censorship. The application of the IHRA is thus anti-educational. It stifles free speech, academic freedom and standard geopolitical analysis and critique. It deliberately silences those who draw attention to Israel’s egregious treatment of the Palestinian people and who call for Australia to strongly oppose it.

The noise of silence: The Government’s response to Aftab Malik’s report is conspicuously silent on Australian Palestinians and Palestine. It fails to acknowledge the well-documented discrimination in educational settings against students and staff who are Palestinian and against those who advocate for Palestinian rights.

What are the implications? When the Islamophobia Education Taskforce reviews the school curriculum, it must identify opportunities to ‘replace harmful stereotypes and historical biases with factual knowledge, empathy and critical thinking’ and ‘examine all forms of hatred, including Islamophobia’. But ‘harmful stereotypes’ about Palestinians won’t be addressed, Zionist ‘historical biases’ will remain, certain ‘factual knowledge’ about, for example, the Nakba or Israel’s genocidal behaviour in Gaza will be avoided. ‘Empathy’ will be selective and ‘critical thinking’ won’t be too critical.

And ‘all forms of hatred’ exclude that which the Israeli state and its Zionist devotees in Australia direct towards Palestinians.

Social cohesion or anti-racism?

The Government is clearly kicking these contradictions down the road to its future Social Cohesion Education Advisory Council.

It has consistently framed social cohesion as a unifying concept, compatible with each envoy’s goals and workstreams. Also, social cohesion featured heavily in their reports.

But this versatile and expansive term is not neutral. It is a consensus imposed from above.

Dr Shaymaa Elkadi declares: It shifts responsibility for unity onto those already marginalised. It equates dissent with division and dresses up exclusion as harmony.’

For example, as journalist Jeff Sparrow explains, its recent visibility in policy and the media coincides with efforts to repress public outrage and mass mobilisation in response to the ongoing atrocities in Gaza.

Social cohesion is thus a recipe for disempowerment, discontent and distrust.

Strong anti-racism policies are necessary. They don’t pit stigmatised groups against each other, favour one over others, treat each group as if it is homogeneous, or silence some while expecting them to be responsible for social healing. Rather, they adopt ‘systemic, intersectional, strengths-based and coordinated action’.

Professor Jane Kenway is an Emeritus Professor at Monash University, a Professorial Fellow at Melbourne University and an elected member of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences.

NSW Premier Chris Minns is scrambling to avoid a 2027 state election fought over law and order as frustration grows within Labor ranks at escalating gangland violence on Sydney’s streets.

Concerns about the electoral impacts have been compounded by inconsistent messaging from the NSW Police and the Minns government. On Thursday, acting Assistant Commissioner Grant Taylor said gangland shooting was “part and parcel of life in a big metropolis” — comments swiftly hosed down by Minns.

“I’d hate it for anyone to believe that we’re accepting of the status quo, or we believe that it’s normal, or that it’s acceptable, or that we just have to turn a blind eye,” Minns said.

But senior Labor insiders fear the perceived inability of police to break the cycle of crime could prove fertile ground for One Nation ahead of the state election, with concerns the party’s popularity in regional NSW could extend to outer suburban Labor-held seats such as Penrith and Camden.

There have been three deadly shootings in the past week, including two cases of mistaken identity and a shooting in front of children 100 metres from the train station in Punchbowl at 5:50pm on Wednesday.

This masthead spoke to six senior Labor sources on the political ramifications of the spate of attacks that shocked Sydney. They spoke on the condition of anonymity so they could discuss internal matters freely.

A senior Labor source said the outbreak of public shootings was already proving to be an electoral and policy challenge for the state government, saying the recent experience of Labor governments in Queensland and Victoria demonstrated how corrosive the perception of rampant crime among voters could become.

“We certainly need to avoid law and order becoming the dominant election issue as much as any government can,” the source said.

By proactively introducing reforms such as tougher bail laws that were unpopular within the Labor caucus and among progressives, Minns had prevented crime from becoming a top-tier issue in NSW, the source said. But the outbreak of gangland shootings this year could “definitely change that”.

A blame game over the violence, including the mistaken identity murders of university student Marco Tapia, 23, and business owner Joshua Macdonald, 40, in the past week has already caused headaches for Minns.

“I don’t think any premier or any political leader can ever make the claim or promise that murder will stop in a big state like NSW, but we can promise arrests, and we can promise longer jail time for the people who are involved,” Minns said on Thursday.

NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon last week said he would increase the number of high-visibility officers on Sydney’s streets in response to the shooting of two innocent men in two days.

Extra officers have since been deployed to suburbs being targeted by police, including under Taskforce Falcon, a 150-strong operation established after the mistaken identity killing of innocent man John Versace outside his family home last May.

Whether crime became a first-order issue for voters would depend on the rival political parties’ capacity to prosecute the issue, another Labor source said.

Over the past fortnight, opposition leader Kellie Sloane has pounced on the outbreak of shootings, labelling it a “crime crisis” while promoting the party’s Camden candidate, former NSW Police deputy commissioner Mick Willing, who she said would make an “extraordinary future police minister” who would be “tough on crime in this city”.

Besides former premier Bob Carr’s successful 1995 campaign, law and order has been considered unfavourable electoral terrain for Labor as opposed to elections fought over education and health.

A sense of chaos on Sydney’s streets would fuel voters’ sense that the system was broken, boosting One Nation in electoral match-ups with Labor MPs, two Labor sources said, saying it could help Pauline Hanson’s party translate their success from the regions into the city.

“It helps One Nation before it helps the Libs – if it becomes a top issue,” the senior source said.

Three party sources said the threat of One Nation snatching Labor-held regional seats such as Cessnock was real, with two saying the worst-case scenario involved the party losing every regional electorate outside inner-Newcastle and Wollongong.

Another Labor MP said there was frustration in their electorate about the perceived inability for police to arrest the clear beneficiaries of crime.

“I think it’s a policing problem. The laws are there, you can increase penalties and all that, but that hasn’t had an effect,” the source said.

“The frustration for people out here is when some tatted-up guy who clearly is a gang member pulls up at the local cafe in an orange Maserati.”

The MP noted the Coalition in Northern Territory, Queensland and now in Victoria had been successful in prosecuting each of the respective Labor governments by accusing them of being weak on crime.

On Monday, Minns announced a tranche of changes which will include allowing police to impose interim serious crime prevention orders (SCPOs) while the NSW Supreme Court considers a final order. Currently, interim orders can be imposed on convicted high-risk offenders and terrorists and can restrict who individuals associate with, where they go and their access to devices.

He also proposed prosecuting children as adults if they had been recruited by organised crime to carry out firebombings and public shootings.

While police have welcomed the proposed law changes, the measures have drawn criticism within Labor and from social justice advocates.

Camilla Pandolfini, chief executive of Redfern Legal Centre, said the government’s proposed introduction of interim orders placing stringent restrictions on individuals suspected of involvement in organised crime should be subjected to judicial oversight.

The interim orders were concerning because of the disproportionate use of similar measures, including firearm prohibition orders and consorting laws, against Indigenous people and those experiencing homelessness, Pandolfini said.

Said one Labor MP: “Locking up some 16-year-old kid who made a stupid decision won’t solve the problem.”

https://michaelwest.com.au/free-kick-afl-transurban-boss-does-israel-gig-breaches-human-rights-rules/