The Labor Conference Confirms What We Have Known All Along: Protect the Relationship, Never Say “Genocide”
Australia is a party to the Genocide Convention (CPPCG). This requires Australia to prevent and punish genocide, whether committed during peace or war.
Australia is also a state party to the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which it signed in 2013 and ratified in 2014. This prohibits the transfer of weapons and ammunition, parts and components where it has knowledge, at the time of authorisation, that the items would be used to commit genocide.
Once the Labor government accepts that genocide is occurring, its own conduct comes under sharper scrutiny. Diplomatic protection, military cooperation, defence trade, intelligence relationships and the movement of weapons or components can no longer be treated as separate policy questions. They become questions about whether Australia has done everything reasonably available to prevent the crime and whether any Australian activity has helped sustain it and enable it.
Labor’s refusal to call Gaza a genocide is a political policy designed to preserve the government’s freedom to condemn suffering while avoiding the obligations, accountability and consequences that would follow from naming its cause.
What Labor did
While Gaza was being destroyed, Australia maintained close strategic and diplomatic relations with Israel. It resisted sanctions and a comprehensive arms embargo. It defended the broader alliance architecture surrounding Israel. It continued to separate Australian defence relationships, military supply chains and intelligence facilities from the destruction occurring in Gaza. Naming genocide would collapse that separation.
Ed Husic
Ed Husic attempted to bring the genocide finding into Labor’s own national conference. His motion did not reach an open debate after potential support disappeared and the required procedural backing failed to materialise. The conference endorsed a controlled platform position while avoiding a public vote on whether Gaza should be recognised as genocide. Labor did not simply decline to adopt the word; its structures prevented the word from being tested.
Refusing to say the word "Genocide" therefore protects more than Israel. It protects the Australian government from a forensic examination of its own decisions, and invite question about Australian-made components entering international weapons systems, defence exports and permits, intelligence support through facilities such as Pine Gap, political protection extended to Israeli leaders and the government’s repeated refusal to impose material consequences.
