A Gutless Stance Against Those Seeking to Split Us

There’s a sense of unease in our cities and ­suburbs fuelled by a feeling of helplessness as ­people begin to realise the fabric of the country they love is being picked apart thread by thread.

The shambles that unfolded in Canberra over the defection of ­Senator Fatima Payman from the Labor Party was a straw in the wind, a further sign that the nation is fragmenting into groups whose agenda is self-interest with no thought for the good of all.

You might well wonder how a person for whom 1621 people voted in Western Australia is now attempting to direct the foreign policy of those 26 million of us who didn’t vote for her, and how she managed to be endorsed by the Labor Party in the first place, unless of course the fact that she was a woman of colour and a Muslim played into it.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is now reaping the harvest he has sown with his vacillation, lack of leadership and half-hearted support of Israel over the Gaza issue and the anti-Semitism that has been allowed to flourish on our streets and in our universities and most recently on the roof of our national parliament.

Having an each-way bet might be fine for a punt on the Melbourne Cup, but as Albanese is finding to his cost, it doesn’t cut it when you are dealing with racial hate, vitriol and calls for the extermination of the Jewish people.

The appalling, gutless approach of university vice-chancellors in failing to deal with the invasion of their campuses and then capitulating to pro-Palestinian activists demanding a say in the way the universities are run is a disgrace.

These protesters are now claiming a victory.

Now that they’ve discovered how easy it is to intimidate university authorities, they’ll be back for more, making more and more outrageous demands and chanting “from the river to the sea” as they do so.

Jewish students no longer feel safe on campus. How can this happen in our country?

I have no answer other than to ­suggest weakness, a lack of moral fibre and a desperate desire on the part of the vice-chancellors to hang on to their obscenely bloated salaries.

The Vote Muslim Movement says it will now run candidates in seats for federal parliament with large Muslim populations, pushing a Muslim agenda. Clerics recently claimed it was sinful for Muslim students to pay ­indexation on their student loans as do other Australian students and wants them granted a dispensation. One rule for them, another for the rest.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton raised the spectre of the Albanese government being voted into a minority and having to do deals with the Greens, teals and Vote Muslim members in order to govern.

He voiced a reasonable concern, but predictably was branded a bigot.

This political fragmentation follows the avoidable disaster that was the Voice referendum, which revealed there were those people who did not regard themselves as Australians, but as a group deserving of ­special treatment, with those who opposed this view vilified as racists.

It was a case of us and them with the dictum being if you’re not with us you’re against us.