Carr targets Gillard over ‘shameful’ Palestine policy

TONY WALKER

Former foreign minister Bob Carr has launched a withering denunciation of ex prime minister Julia Gillard and Victorian allies, including Bill Shorten, over their attempts to stymie an Australian vote at the United Nations to elevate Palestine’s status.

Carr also heaps scorn on Gillard staff-member Bruce Wolpe, whom he portrays as a tool of a Melbourne-based pro-Israel lobby, for his efforts to ensure Australia maintained an uncritical view of Israel’s settlements policy.

In his new book, Diary of a Foreign Minister, Carr provides a detailed account of the most contentious foreign policy issue of the Gillard prime ministership, and one that threatened to splinter the cabinet.

Carr’s battles with Gillard and her close advisers, including Wolpe and then cabinet secretary, Victorian MP Mark Dreyfus, over Israel, mark sour component of his term in office.

“Our stance on the Middle East is shameful,” he writes in his diary of November 10, 2012.

“In lockstep with the Likud, designed to feed the worst instincts of Israel, and encourage it to self-destruct.’’

In the same diary entry Carr complains bitterly he was prevented from using the word “condemn’’ to characterise Australia’s reaction to Benjamin Netanyahu government’s continuing settlement activity.

Carr laments that “all statements on the Middle East’’ had to be drawn to the attention of Wolpe and Dreyfus in the PM’s office.

He was told by Wolpe and/or Dreyfus “we don’t use the word condemn”, and “whatever we do, advise the Israeli ambassador first”.

American-born Wolpe is a former US Congressional staff member.

Carr’s detailed account of the intense argument in cabinet that preceded Australia’s decision to abstain on a vote elevating Palestine’s status to observer at the UN provides an extraordinary insight into the extent to which Gillard identified herself with Israel’s interests.

Outnumbered 10-2 in cabinet on the Palestine question (only communications minister Stephen Conroy and workplace relations minister Bill Shorten supported her), Gillard insisted it was her prerogative to say “no” in defiance of a cabinet consensus.

“Her brisk efficiency descended into a style that was icy and robotic,” Carr writes in a November 27 entry.

In the end, a weakened prime minister changed her stance and agreed that Australia would abstain on the Palestine vote in recognition that her own cabinet had abandoned her.

Carr had prevailed over those he refers to in his book contemptuously as the “falafel faction”.

Tony Walker is The Australian Financial Review's dual Walkley Award-winning international editor. He is the AFR's former political editor. His foreign postings have included Washington for the AFR, and Beijing and Cairo for the Financial Times of London. He received a Centenary of Federation Award for contributions to Journalism in 2001 and is a recipient of the Paul Lyneham Award for Excellence in press gallery journalism in 2003.

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