New Dawn Fades on Ley's Joyless Division
Atrocity Exhibition, Shadowplay, or total lack of Insight?
Having spent many years addicted to Australian politics, it isn’t bad policy, scandal, or ineptitude that disappoints me most. It’s cynicism. I no longer believe in rock bottoms.
We’ve watched climate action debated with slogans as vulgar as ditch the bitch and senators call for a ‘final solution’ to immigration policy in maiden speeches. Shock jocks have encouraged the drowning of Prime Ministers, while ex-major party leaders’ scatological proclivities surface in nightmarish detail.
But there’s something exceedingly sinister about the hijacking of others’ pain for political gain. This week, Sussan Ley made a mockery of antisemitism, choosing to fixate on Prime Minister Albanese’s Joy Division t-shirt.
While Australian Jews have fought an uphill battle to have antisemitism taken seriously, the unseriousness of such a profoundly cynical episode of political point-scoring beggars belief.
The last thing Australian Jews need is the trivialisation of antisemitism.
Conversations about what constitutes antisemitism have rattled university campuses, writers’ festivals, and federal courts. In Wertheim v Haddad [2025] the court found that antisemitic speech is prohibited by discrimination law, but that criticism of Israel is not—congruent with the contested IHRA formulation that “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”
In a testament to broad public confusion, many of the Australians who frame IHRA as an attack on free speech welcomed the court’s decision.
The Leader of the Opposition could not have done a better job of muddying the waters.
Joy Division took their name from a passage in a controversial novella about prostitution wings in Nazi camps. NME journalist Paul Rambali described the band in 1979 as “sorrowful, painful and sometimes deeply sad,” one year before lead singer Ian Curtis hanged himself while battling severe epilepsy and crippling depression. In the Rambali interview Curtis muses, “we don’t want to state what people should be and how they should interpret our songs…”.
If Joy Division were starting out today, there’s a chance that Spotify’s algorithmic sorting hat might have turfed their chances. But context is crucial. This was a band who produced harrowing, avant-garde sounds that fill listeners’ stomachs with the grit and the grey of outer-Manchester’s industrial decline. One would have to have never listened to Joy Division to assume that they’re making light of the Holocaust.
To argue that a t-shirt evidences Albanese’s antisemitism is worse than nonsense: it’s vile. This calculated attempt at political point scoring uses Jewish suffering as a cudgel.
Eighteen months ago, my partner and I walked to Newtown Dendy to see Golda, a biopic on Golda Meir’s leadership during the Yom Kippur War. On the way, we vented our frustration at those likening Australia’s rise in antisemitism with 1930s Germany. It felt hyperbolic and dishonest—more emotional than factual.
The conversation wasn’t about diminishing Jews’ experiences. It was part of an ongoing desperate attempt to arrange a perfect combination of words in a way that might budge the broader population’s blind spots. We were scared that mentioned the Holocaust might jeopardise the possibility of being heard.
Posters and graffiti coalesced into wallpaper while we walked and talked. “Globalise the intifada,” “Glory to the martyrs,” “ZioNazis die,” the odd swastika, and the word “Jews” with a line through it decorate the streets. It felt, and still feels, like Jews everywhere are being made to feel a shame never demanded of our Chinese, Russian, or Persian peers.
The word ‘Zionist’ often acts like a paper bag on a longneck, disappearing antisemitic slurs behind a sanctioned veil. Zionists aren’t necessarily people who support Israel’s actions—they’re just people who believe it has a right to exist. The bar to entry for Zionism is remarkably low, yet the city streets want Jews to know that saying “L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim” (“next year in Jerusalem”) at the end of Seder for centuries makes you a ‘Nazi’. And yet we debate, trying to square the circle, reaching for a coherent justification for the writing on the wall, and some way of resisting it with our own words.
As Golda started rolling, four teenagers slipped into the front row to vape and make out. An hour in, Meir’s cabinet are forced to reckon with the death and despair of war. The cinema sags under the weight of history repeated, war after war, death after death. And in that sobering moment, a voice through the silence bellows: “KILL THE JEWS!”.
I looked around at a cinema full of people choosing to ignore it.
The walk home was very different.
Australians don’t need party leaders to feign disgust over t-shirts. We need party leaders that seek to understand all Australians; leaders who can sincerely articulate minorities’ experiences to the rest of the country.
We need leaders who know the difference between antisemitism and politics. We need leaders whose silences, equivocations, cynicism, and politicking don’t metastasise into dynamics that make minorities not only feel unsafe, but left to fend for themselves.
I should not have to escort people from cinemas, I should not have to convince my contemporaries that Australian Jews did not elect Netanyahu, and I should not have to explain that Joy Division t-shirts are not antisemitic.
