‘Labor lacks a spine’
"When they have an opportunity to stand tall on national security, they lack the courage to do so," the Tasmanian senator said.
“War is always going to have a bigger cost on civilians than anybody in uniform,” Senator Jacqui Lambie told The AJN in a sit-down interview last Friday. “However, when you have terrorists in your backyard, you will always have carnage until you’ve got rid of every last one.”
Lambie was in Sydney to launch the Senate candidacy of former soldier and military lawyer Glenn Kolomeitz. In a wide-ranging discussion, Lambie accused the federal government of “lacking spine” and “playing on the fence”.
“When they have an opportunity to stand tall on national security, they lack the courage to do so,” the Tasmanian senator said.
She lashed the government’s response to remarks by Iranian ambassador Ahmad Sadeghi, who called for Israel to be wiped out “by 2027”. “He should have been removed from this country effective immediately,” she said.
Lambie said the government could have also cut funding to universities that allowed “unruly protests” on their campuses. “Once again, Labor lacks a spine,” she said.
She called the Greens “the biggest division in this country has ever seen” and the party’s resistance to call Hamas a terrorist organisation “absolutely shameful”.
Lambie also took aim at Indigenous Australians who have taken a side in the Gaza war. “Most Indigenous are struggling to put food on their table. That’s a reality. So maybe they might want to go back and help their own.”
She also pledged to push to ban Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir and said she would “love to” go to Israel after the next election.
Wearing a “Bring them home” tag, Kolomeitz called the Albanese government’s rhetoric during the Gaza war “very unhelpful, and I have to say, very disappointing”.
“We’re hearing all this rhetoric out of the Parliament, which enables some of the lunacy we’re seeing … on the one hand, they say, ‘we’ve got to respect Jewish Australians.’ On the other hand, they’re smacking Israel around,” he said.
“Gaza’s an enormously complex battle space … I doubt Australian planning would come up with … a lesser figure of collateral damage.”
Blasting Penny Wong’s response to the death of aid worker Zomi Frankcom in Gaza in April, he said, “How dare they send anybody, let alone a retired Air Force senior military officer, to a sovereign state to oversee their investigation of their own military operations. I don’t know who they think they are.”
As for ACM Mark Binskin’s report largely exonerating Israel’s investigation into the incident, Kolomeitz said, “It was as though she [Wong] was disappointed in Binskin’s report and had to try and find something to have a crack at.”
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