Bringing the war home: Gaza threatens to reshape an Australian election

By Christine Chen and Byron Kaye

SYDNEY (Reuters) -Sydney non-profit worker Az Fahmi was once a dedicated volunteer for Australia's ruling Labor party, handing out pamphlets to get her local representative, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, re-elected.

That all changed for the human rights activist following Israel's retaliation for an attack by Hamas militants in 2023, which has left Gaza in rubble, displaced millions and killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, according to Palestinian officials.

Ahead of a May 3 election, Fahmi is now campaigning to oust Burke over what she believes is his party's "dismal" response to the Muslim community's calls for the Australian government to support Palestinians in Gaza.

"The only time they will ever listen is during election time," Fahmi, who identifies as Muslim and has Syrian-Iraqi ancestry, told Reuters.

In Brisbane, stay-at-home mother Hava Mendelle, who identifies as Jewish, backed Labor for its climate policies last election but now leads a campaign with hundreds of volunteers to topple "a weak Labor government that hasn't done enough" to stop a spate of antisemitic attacks.

The discontent of voters like Fahmi and Mendelle highlights how the war in Gaza has fractured support for Labor, a party seeking to fend off the conservative Liberal-National opposition and win a second term in power.

Since late 2023, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's government has walked a fine line between expressing concern for Palestinians, repeatedly calling for a ceasefire, and supporting ally Israel's right to self-defence.

The approach has angered pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel voters, leaving Labor vulnerable in at least nine of the lower house seats it needs to hold onto its one-seat majority in the 150-seat parliament, election experts say.

Fahmi's electorate is among three multicultural, working class seats in western Sydney that have long been Labor strongholds, where up to one in three voters is Muslim, despite making up just 3.2% of Australia's population.

Similarly, Jewish Australians are just 0.5% of the overall population but make up to one-sixth of voters in wealthy inner-city electorates in Sydney and Melbourne.

The demographics of both could result in big swings against incumbent lawmakers, election experts say.

Independent election analyst William Bowe said Labor could face a damaging 20% swing against it in western Sydney, where incumbents secured just over half the primary vote in 2022, mirroring the UK Labour party's losses last year due to a Muslim voter backlash over the Gaza War.

'ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL'

Andy Marks, executive director of think tank the Centre for Western Sydney, said Muslim voters were not "homogenous" and local issues like healthcare and housing typically took precedence over events on the other side of the world.

However, at this Australian election, family connections to the Middle East had brought the Gaza war home to many voters.

"The rule for western Sydney is all politics is local," Marks said. For Muslims, "the immediacy of events in the Middle East, through social media, through family connections, makes those issues for some feel very local".

Ziad Basyouny, a Muslim doctor who is running against Burke, said he had felt ignored living in a safe Labor electorate for two decades but "when the Gaza issue came up, that was like the straw that broke the camel's back".

Albanese, Burke and Education Minister Jason Clare, whose seat in western Sydney has a Muslim population of 32%, did not respond to requests for comment.

Under Australia's complex preferential voting system, if no candidate receives over half the primary vote, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and preferences are redistributed until a winner emerges. That means a candidate can lead with 49% of the primary vote but still lose.

Independents like Basyouny could make up for a lack of primary votes by striking deals with other candidates to favour each other in how-to-vote cards handed out at polling booths – a strategy lower-profile candidates sometimes use to maximise chances of winning or block shared adversaries.

The Muslim Vote, a grassroots organisation supporting three candidates including Basyouny, saw a "really strong appetite at the moment to put Labor last" in how-to-vote cards, said sheikh Wesam Charkawi, the group's convener.

CONSERVATIVES SEEK JEWISH VOTE

Local media has reported that the opposition conservative coalition has ruled out a deal with pro-Palestine groups and instead leaned into support for the Jewish community, criticising Albanese for being weak on antisemitism.

The coalition opposition has fronted up pro-Israel candidates in Sydney's affluent eastern suburbs and in inner-Melbourne, home to Australia's biggest Jewish populations, in hopes of winning back seats that fell to environment-focused independents in 2022.

In Sydney, conservative candidate Ro Knox studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, while independent incumbent Allegra Spender faced backlash from Jewish constituents for supporting funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

On Bondi Beach, Sydney resident Shaun Eliastam said Knox had his vote. Spender should have disavowed UNRWA instead of "trying to play both sides", he said.

"When one is bad and one is good, you can't please two people. You need to take a side."

Melbourne conservative candidate Tim Wilson is campaigning with a slogan "proudly Zionist" although he is not Jewish, challenging independent Zoe Daniel's seat. Knox and Wilson declined to be interviewed.

"I think for the first time in the history of our community, people will be voting primarily on the issue of Israel and antisemitism," Alex Ryvchin, co-chief executive of peak Jewish body the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, said.

Though Mendelle's Brisbane electorate has a small Jewish population, she said her group would target about 10 seats across Australia's eastern states with a campaign involving social media and billboards, aiming to boost conservatives.

Fahmi said she was campaigning against Labor but wanted a minority Labor government where independents like Basyouny can hold power.

"What happened in Gaza really mobilised people," she said. "I don't think our local representatives realised how important this issue is to many people."

(Reporting by Byron Kaye, Christine Chen and Jill Gralow in Sydney; Editing by Michael Perry)