Muslim votes: Australia’s larrikin egalitarianism is more appealing than tribalism

The same people then attempt to win group privileges as part of a political accommodation with them. But that challenges the individual rights that are central to the system of liberalism.

The Voice referendum was a key example, but the rise of a Muslim vote is another.

The era of terrorism highlighted how significant portions of the Islamic community were prone to conflating their own personal feelings of disenfranchisement with global Islam and in particular its historic humiliations.

Palestine has always represented the apex of this trend, allowing ordinary Muslims to channel their personal failures and grievances into a grander historical narrative. I can remember, while growing up, relatives yelling at the television news when pictures of Gaza were aired, linking the conflict to why they didn’t get a promotion at work.

Barely two years ago, Muslim groups celebrated the ascent of three Muslim MPs elected to parliament, including cabinet minister Ed Husic. Only two years later the newly elected senator Fatima Payman has quit the Labor Party, claiming she was marginalised.

In parallel, something of a Muslim movement has emerged, with potential Muslim candidates for the federal parliament who may run primarily on the issue of justice for Palestinians in the Middle East.

It has already happened in the United Kingdom. A BBC analysis confirms that areas with large Muslim populations saw large drops in their traditional Labour Party vote at last week’s election, instead electing five independent MPs running on the issue of justice for Palestinians.

George Galloway of the far-left Workers Party won a byelection earlier this year running on such a single issue. Despite losing this time, he captured the primacy of the conflict in the minds of many.

“We’re not single issue, but if we were, Gaza is the mother of all issues.” Galloway told the BBC on the eve of the election.

The rise of the far right across Europe has led many European-based Muslims to also feel increasingly alienated. Even parties of the left that are strong supporters of a Palestinian state, and sympathetic to claims of Islamophobia, also support policies of marked social liberalism, especially on issues linked to homosexuality or feminism.

In France, for example, most left-wing parties are also staunch secularists against wearing religious markers such as the hijab in public. This is in keeping with the anticlerical strand in European socialism, especially anti-Catholicism.

Likewise, the local Australian Greens are unattractive given their views on issues like transgenderism, homosexuality or parenting. Muslim communities were the primary group who voted against the successful same-sex marriage referendum.

Muslims in Australia have very broad origins, from the former Yugoslavia and Lebanon through to South Asia. The proportion of highly skilled migrants is also greater, the result of our immigration policies, and different again from Europe. In fact, a curious feature of Australia is that darker-skinned Muslim migrants, primarily from parts of Asia, are more likely to belong to higher socioeconomic groups.

Political scientist Peter Chen of the University of Sydney points to European studies suggesting that as Muslims become older and moderate, they are more likely to vote along socioeconomic lines. It is those who identify as strongly religious, are younger and see themselves as Muslim first and foremost, who are likely to see Gaza as a meta issue, encapsulating not just a local injustice but a worldview around anticolonialism, Western dominance and American hegemony.

Outwardly, any so-called Muslim vote in south-western Sydney would seem to disadvantage Labor most of all. But Peter Dutton and the Coalition should be wary of harping upon any kind of ethnic tribalism.

The critical Chinese community across Sydney and Melbourne don’t need to be reminded of Dutton’s hawkish foreign policy sentiments in the 2022 election that, to them, didn’t adequately differentiate the Chinese Communist Party from local Chinese-Australians. The Albanese government has since then had success in stabilising tensions with China.

Anthony Albanese now has a great opportunity to be prime ministerial, to underscore Australia’s unique civic identity planted in historical egalitarianism not tribal membership.

Source: Muslim votes: Australia’s larrikin egalitarianism is more appealing than tribalism