Australia Needs First Nations Truth-Telling Not Hasbara Hiding Israel’s Colonial Crimes

On taking office, the Albanese government acknowledged need for broad First Nations reform. Labor held a referendum on an Indigenous voice to parliament, while Senator Lidia Thorpe led a campaign insisting truth-telling and treaty are the priority. However, the nation is now instead teetering on adopting Israel’s long-term hasbara, or propaganda, regime, which hides its colonial abuses.

The Voice referendum sought to establish a body of First Nations representatives to provide nonbinding advice to parliament on matters affecting Indigenous peoples. Thorpe was one of many decrying the voice proposal as weak and ineffective, as rather, a robust truth-telling process would provide a clear and honest foundational basis for recognised entities to negotiate treaties.

The unsuccessful outcome of the Voice referendum was delivered on 14 October 2023. A divisive No campaign led by the Coalition saw to this, and the outcome hinted at the first murmurings of a broad white nationalist movement that is now upon us. The rejection of an Indigenous representative voice also came just a week after the outbreak of the soul-destroying and ongoing Gaza genocide.

As awareness of Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians grew, Labor’s will to progress First Peoples reform was lost. The reasons for this became more obvious over time, as this nation was prone to support Israel in its “self-defence”-cloaked genocide, and progressing truths about local settler colonialism became highly unpalatable, as they’d further erode legitimacy of Israel’s project.

Yet, 26 months on and PM Anthony Albanese has just agreed to adopt a plan to combat antisemitism that unelected antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal released in July. This plan requires that Australia officially incorporates a fraudulent definition of antisemitism, which serves to deflect criticism of Israel’s apartheid regime, and it will too serve to erase attempts to reconcile with local colonial lies.

Adopting the Israeli agenda

The envoy released her preposterous Plan to Combat Antisemitism on 10 July 2025. The document seeks to insert the fraudulent IHRA working definition of antisemitism into the heart of Australian government and institutions, and the issue with this is it relies on eleven examples of prejudice towards Jews, yet seven of them rather involve criticism of Israel wrapped up as antisemitism.

As US political dissent Noam Chomsky has explained, advocates of Israel commenced conflating criticism of that nation, as well as critiques of Zionism, with antisemitism in the late 1960s. Being charged with antisemitism carries the memory of the dehumanising Jewish hatred that the Nazis displayed in World War II, when they systematically genocided close to 6 million European Jews.

The conflation of political criticism of Israel, a Jewish state, with antisemitism is a device the Israel lobby applies in an attempt to hide the occupation of the Palestinians, as the ongoing genocidal Israeli settler colonial project progresses at apace. And the Israeli project is underpinned by Zionism, which is the 1880s political doctrine seeking to establish a Jewish state in historic Palestine.

Albanese announced the nation will be adopting the 13 recommendations that Segal’s plan progresses, just four days after the horrific 14 December 2025 Bondi Beach massacre, but five months after plan release. The proposal means all sectors, including media and tertiary institutions, will be scoured and rid of criticism of Israeli settler colonialism, as it will be labelled antisemitism.

So, while the truth-telling that Thorpe and other First Nations politicians and grassroots advocates have been prioritising as a necessary step for people living on this continent to come to grips with the violence of invasion and genocide, the adoption of Israel’s hasbara agenda, with its aim of erasing Palestinian identities, is going to be in active conflict with any local truths to be told here.

Silencing down under

Senator Thorpe was perhaps the most vocal advocate for truth-telling over voice back in 2023, but she was in good company. There was broad First Nations support for truth and treaty over voice. The Greens had progressed this position initially, when Labor first moved on the Voice referendum. The Blak Greens took truth over voice to the vote.

The reason that truth-telling needs to take place in this country is that in the earlier days of the Australian settler colonial project, a lot of myths were propagated to deflect criticism of it. The myth of a ‘white Australia’ created on terra nullius land broadly sums up a multitude of colonial lies that need addressing. Such mistruths continue to hide injustices and propagate further colonial crimes.

Australian settler academia propagated “The Great Australian Silence” over the first seven decades following 1901 federation. This comprised of writing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people out of the history books. Anthropologist W E Stanner broke the silence via his 1968 lectures called After the Dreaming, as did historian Henry Reynolds in his 1970 work Why Weren’t We Told?.

Of course, the violence of the Australian settler colonial project was never hidden from the First Peoples of the continent, and it continues on into the present.

“People in this country need to share an understanding of our past and how this influences our present. Once everyone knows where we’re coming from, we can decide where we’re going together,” Thorpe told Sydney Criminal Lawyers in late 2023. “The people need truth before we can negotiate a treaty. People want truth in this country, and it’s time to tell it.”

Many nations, countless massacres

The Bondi Beach massacre was perpetrated against the local Sydney Jewish community by deranged father and son Sajid and Naveed Akram, who’d been spurred by hateful ISIS ideology. ISIS has no affiliation with the Palestinian cause.

Assertions currently being propagated in the public sphere linking the two-year-old nonviolent pro-Palestinian/antigenocide movement to the tragedy that has just consumed the local community is yet another example of the same Israeli hasbara seeking to stamp out a visibly sizable local movement even on the global stage, by insinuating that it had actually influenced the mass murder.

Assertions about the massacre being “a worst” are too problematic on Indigenous land. While the Bondi Beach mass shooting certainly represents the worst terrorist incident here in the post-9/11 era. This continent is the site of numerous colonial massacres from invasion to the 1928 Coniston massacre that took 60-odd lives on the lands of the Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Kaytetye peoples.

Terrorism might not have been the common term employed to the British perpetrated atrocities against the First Peoples of this continent, however the massacres themselves shared all the politically-motivated hallmarks of incidents in the present.

Through a Tel Avivan lens

“I sent prime minister Albanese of Australia a letter, in which I gave him warning, that the Australian government’s policy was promoting and encouraging antisemitism in Australia,” Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu told the press in the immediate aftermath of the mass murder in Bondi.

The wanted war criminal went on to imply that Albanese’s recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly in September, had served to propagate antisemitism in this country. So, Netanyahu is positing an equation that involves the recognition of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination equalling entities on this continent wanting to harm Jewish people.

US journalist Glenn Greenwald has pointed out that Netanyahu’s onslaught of hasbara in the wake of the Bondi Beach massacre resulted in Albanese moving to roll out the antisemitism envoy’s plan in line with the Israeli agenda, and that UK PM Keir Stamer has also jumped to attention in terms of actioning plans to stamp out criticism of Israel, via the pretext of antisemitism, in his country.

Albanese’s appointment of the envoy in August 2024 appeared to be in response to suggested rising antisemitic crimes, however in its wake it has become clear that ‘the antisemitism envoy system’ is operating throughout the western world with the aim of inserting the false definition into official spaces to stamp out criticism of Israeli settler colonialism and it’s been in place since at least 2004.

The NSW government has moved to enact laws that provide for a blanket ban on public protests for up to 3 months in response to the Bondi Beach massacre. This means that right now the Invasion Day rally of 2026 is under threat.

The potential silencing of the First Nations voices to be raised in these rallies, that have been building in momentum since the 40th anniversary of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in 2012, will ultimately be at the behest of the Israeli state and its genocidal leader Benjamin Netanyahu.