Wednesday, 25th January, 2006

If the NSW Liberal Party is gaining political benefit from its assertions that police are going easier on young Lebanese thugs than on non-Moslems involved in the Cronulla riots and their violent aftermath.then it is the Labor Party's past dealings with Lebanese that is the reason. Over more than two decades there is a well documented history of Labor appeasing Lebanese community leaders and Premier Morris Iemma being the member for Lakemba makes it impossible for him to escape knowledge of it. As the State National Party Leader Andrew Stoner told the special parliamentary session back in December:

"It is a sad indictment of the Labor Government that after nearly 11 years of inaction, despite ongoing warning signs about ethnic gang crime, we have a last-minute kneejerk reaction that has necessitated the emergency recall of Parliament to give police the powers they should have had all along.

"Presiding over this debacle is Morris Iemma, whose electorate of Lakemba has long been the breeding ground of ethnic gang crime problems. As the local member, he has been totally ineffective in dealing with the festering sore of these criminal gangs. Perhaps this is due to the use by the Labor Party of these gangs in branch-stacking in the late 1990s."

It was back in 1985 that the Lakemba religious leader Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly learned that leaning on Labor Party leaders could work. Hilaly, born in Egypt, had arrived in Australia on a tourist visa in 1982 from Lebanon and declined to return home. His early sermons at Lakemba were fire-and-brimstone attacks on Israel and the West and in February 1985 he gave a sermon that appeared to praise suicide bombers and denigrate non-Muslim society. The then Fedceral Immigration Minister, Chris Hurford, decided that Hilaly should be deported.

The Lebanese ethnic "leaders" went in to action immediately and found a receptive audience in their pleas to have Hurford's decision reversed. The right wing operatives of the NSW Labor machine, who I knew very well in those days working on election campaigns for Prime Minister Bob Hawke, feared the consequences from alienating a major community group. Hurford was removed as Immigration Minister to be replaced by that masterful machine man and former Party Federal Secretary Mick Young. Young reversed the expulsion decision and Hawke publicly hugged Hilaly at a Muslim community dinner attended by a who's who of the Labor Party, including the local member, Paul Keating, three days before the 1987 Federal election.

The thrusting of Barrie Unsworth from the Legislative Council into the Premiership of NSW that year to replace Neville Wran meant finding him a lower house seat and the choice of Rockdale meant another wonderful opportunity for the Lebanese chieftains. Rockdale had a sizeable Lenabese community and a State Party going so badly as the NSW Labor Government was in those days could not afford to alienate anybody. As a worker on Unsworth's ill-fated campaign in 1987-88 I have to confess to not opposing the considerable influence that Lebanese achieved.

In 1988 Hilaly, now elevated by the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils to the title of Mufti, said in a speech at Sydney University that Jews were trying to control the world through "sex, then sexual perversion, then the promotion of espionage, treason and economic hoarding". These inflammatory remarks were ignored by the Labor Party appeasers and in 1990 Gerry Hand as Immigration Minister proved that Labor's Left could appease as well as the Right by granting Hilaly the permanent residence that would lead to full citizenship.

Labor Premier Unsworth's desire not to upset the Lebanese community would be well understood by Premier Iemma. The Australian on 25 January 2006 in reporting an interview with Liberal Opposition Leader Peter Debnam published a table based on the 2001 Census showing that the ancestry (measured by birthplace of parents) of 14% of the population in Lakemba was North African/Middle Eastern. In the Smithfield electorate held by State Police Minister Carl Scully the proportion was 12%.

Mr Debnam is using these figures to back his claim that Labor is reluctant to offend the "Lebanese powerbrokers". According to Mr Debnam people of Middle Eastern background had a disproportionate influence in the Labor Party because of branch stacking in the 1990s.

Chris Hurford would probably argue that any use of Lebanese to help with branch stacking came after the emergence of the disproportionate influence. He said in an ABC television interview in 2003 that it was "appalling" that his initial decision to expel Hilaly was "ever changed." In another interview with the Sydney Morning Herald the former Immigration Minister said: ""It was sheer populism. Voting power got in the way of good policy."

NSW Government News