Burns: platform does not represent govt policy

Macnamara MP Josh Burns personally negotiated the wording of Labor’s new Middle East platform with Calwell MP Basem Abdo, and has conceded he did not have the numbers at the party’s national conference in Adelaide to secure a stronger outcome.

Speaking to Adam Slonim on the Behind the Headlines podcast, Burns said he entered the foreign policy debate knowing he was in the minority.

“I don’t have the numbers. I’m in a part of the party where we are not the majority, and the majority of the floor would probably take a view that is different to what many in the Jewish community would want from the government,” he said.

The wording he settled on with Abdo was a compromise, he said.

“Nothing we did was going to solve the Middle East. Nothing we did was going to bring peace. It was just a statement of the Australian Labor Party in Adelaide.”

Burns has urged the Jewish community not to read too much into the outcome, adopted on Saturday.

“The platform is a high-level statement of policy. It is not government policy, and it is not the law,” he told The AJN.

“It has been our longstanding policy that Hamas must disarm and have no future role in Palestinian governance, and that the Palestinian Authority must reform.”

Burns said that under Mark Dreyfus as attorney-general, the government changed the law so that the listing of Hamas as a terrorist organisation could become permanent.

“None of that changed at National Conference. In fact, for the first time, Hamas is condemned in our National Platform.”

He said it remained the law that Hamas was a proscribed terrorist organisation that could not be joined, funded or supported in any form.

Burns said criticism of the platform was legitimate.

“I don’t mind if people disagree with me on this. Of course they should, and that’s fine. I’m not here to pretend that everything was perfect.”

Labor Friends of Israel co-convener Mike Kelly has strongly criticised the platform for not including the government’s stance towards Hamas.

“I’ve served in several operations and seen some pretty terrible things – in Iraq, the torture chambers in Fallujah, the beheadings there. But I’ve seen what Hamas is capable of, and they took their actions to an entirely new lower level of human debasement.”

He said anyone who thinks it is okay not to continue to emphasise how evil Hamas is reprehensible.

“It basically indicates they don’t have any place in discussions on the Middle East.”