The Rot Setting in at the National Press Club Is Spreading to Other Australian Institutions

When the National Press Club cancelled an October 2025 address by US Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, as he was to present a speech on Israel’s targeted killing of Palestinian journalists, the respected Australian institution was tarnished. But this week, as it allowed Israeli ambassador Hillel Newman to justify these same killings, the platform had officially sold its soul.

Newman referred to the killing of hundreds of Palestinian journalists as a campaign of “bashing Israel”, as he considers that many of them are Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists presenting as press. Indeed, the Israeli too affirmed the mass killings in Gaza, denied the genocide, and defended his nation’s new law allowing for the hanging of Palestinians convicted of murdering Israelis.

The reaction to the hourlong onslaught of misinformation delivered by the newly-minted ambassador was visceral for many, as the Israeli official was permitted to reaffirm all the Israeli hasbara points that have been debunked over the last 30 months. And the physical revulsion produced by Newman’s diatribe is only set to worsen, as this issue will soon be whole-of-society.

Newman’s Tuesday address was more significant than the cancelling of Hedges, as not only was the public aware through that example that the press club could have prevented the ambassador’s address, but instead, what became apparent was Hillel was being platformed so that he could set the record straight, following two years of local critiques of Israel’s apartheid mission.

Before the National Press Club, the Israeli ambassador’s speech appeared as a creature of the post-Bondi massacre era, as following the December 2025 terrorist incident, the Albanese government finally capitulated to the Israel lobby’s yearlong demand for a “combatting antisemitism” overhaul, which now consists of legislative changes, a whole-of-society revamp and a royal commission.

A smorgasbord of hasbara

“Israel is the ancestral biblical homeland of the Jewish people: the chosen land. But it is situated in a difficult neighbourhood surrounded by those who seek to annihilate it. They seek its destruction for what it represents, a modern democracy, western civilization, and a national home for the Jewish people,” said the ambassador, as he set out the official Israeli version of highly contested ideas.

Newman continued to explain Israel’s position in the Middle East. He justified killings in Gaza but denied any genocide, and he attempted to sully official death counts. The ambassador framed his nation’s incursions into southern Lebanon, which seek to expand Israeli territory, as defensive. And the Israeli man asserted Tehran as aggressor in the US-Israeli war of aggression on Iran.

The Israeli official was appointed to the position of ambassador early last month. He explained to those gathered on Tuesday, that he was born in South Africa, but his family moved to Israel when he was a child, in order to leave behind the “system of segregation” in his birth country, as his parents wanted their children to grow in a country that valued “equality” and “diversity”, such as Israel.

This anecdote that Newman opined was emblematic of his entire speech, as various rights organisations, like Amnesty International and B’Tselem, have assessed Israel to be apartheid. He too raised that two million Israeli Arabs living there and some serving as politicians as proof of Israeli equality, but didn’t mention that the law only recognises the right to self-determination for Jews.

“Israel is acting to protect its civilians as any country would,” the ambassador further said to explain away his country’s attacks southern Lebanon, which are progressing in the same genocidal manner as occurred in Gaza, and he implied that those who criticise these actions as harbouring prejudice.

“Some seek to deny Israel of this fundamental right, simply because of who we are, as if our blood were less red than others,” Hillel lamented.

Hasbara-ing the entire nation

The local Israel lobby began pushing for a whole-of-society overhaul in terms of “combatting antisemitism” at the February 2025 Sky News Antisemitism Summit, whilst in July last year, the mid-2024-appointed Australian antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal released her Plan to Combat Antisemitism, which was basically the same thing first spruiked at the Murdoch press event.

This plan, which is highly outrageous in its scope, just sat around gathering dust like a forgotten nightmare for half a year, until prime minister Anthony Albanese announced that the entire nation would be implementing it on 18 December 2025, just four days after the Bondi Beach massacre saw two ISIS-inspired killers gun down 15 people at a Jewish religious event by the sea.

In the frenzied climate following Bondi, the plan apparently didn’t seem so extreme. But it does seek to implement across Australian society what Newman sought to do at the National Press Club, which is to officially establish the falsehoods that the Israeli state uses to conceal its setter colonial, apartheid and genocidal practices, via a mechanism that turns criticism of Israel into antisemitism.

Right now, the IHRA working definition of antisemitism is being inserted into all levels of Australian government and its institutions. The peculiar aspect of this definition is that it includes eleven examples of antisemitism with seven involving criticising Israel. In practice, the adoption of this definition serves to supress critiques of Israeli rights abuses, because it taken as hatred towards Jews.

The plan to suppress criticism of Israel via combatting antisemitism is leading to an overhaul of the education system and the monitoring of tertiary institutions and all media for criticism of Israel to eradicate it as hatred towards Jews. It too involves an overhaul of the criminal justice system, while cultural institutions will be monitored, and the migration system will too guard against this.

So, the nausea that many constituents felt when the ambassador reaffirmed false Israeli narratives that have been debunked in the Australian public sphere over the last two years, will soon be felt, perhaps more acutely, when officials, politicians, teachers, police officers and journalists, all start shoving these lies down constituents’ throats to cover up mass human rights abuses.

Dissent will soon be spreading

Initiated by an association of journalists, the National Press Club of Australia commenced hosting weekly formal addresses given to lunch audiences in 1963, with political and cultural figures speaking  on important matters of the day. And in over the sixty years of existence, the press club has gained a reputation as the central forum for prominent political figures to address the nation.

Constituents who respected the National Press Club as an open forum, felt resentment when Hedges was denied the right to speak on the sensitive issue of the Gaza genocide. But the move to provide a platform for an Israeli official to express a truckload of false narratives that have repeatedly been shown to be mistruths over the last two years, has left many feeling betrayed by the club.

Prior to the Gaza genocide, an Israeli official spouting rhetoric about his settler colonial nation being “a beacon of democracy and progressive values, a society which dreamed of peace and coexistence with our Arab and Muslim neighbours” might have been acceptable, but now, with 30 months of mass slaughter, coupled with war on Iran and Lebanon, having laid bare all this as lies, it no longer is.

The resentment against the club for allowing Newman to sicken viewers with his abhorrent falsehoods, will soon turn to rejection of the forum, and this will too be the fate that many public institutions and politicians, who start spouting the official “combatting antisemitism” line, as it is clear to much of the constiuency that they’re propagating lies that no one wants to buy.

The indignation spurred by the Israeli ambassador’s stream of utter bullshit at the press club will soon be felt more widespread across the constituency as Australian institutions start to propagate false narratives that have only recently been exposed to a mass of the public as untruths, while the initial betrayal felt by the population towards institutions it once valued, will soon turn to rejection.

And likely the most interesting part of the combatting antisemitism experiment in this country will come following the breaking down in the relationship between the constiuency and the institutions of the state, when the people suddenly become aware en masse that those in power can no longer be trusted.