The recent decision to recognise a non-existent Palestinian state based on questionable assurances from the Palestine Authority despot, Mahmoud Abbas, is yet another example of Australia’s most left-wing Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, swinging his government’s wrecking ball through an aspect of Australian life.

This time he has seriously damaged our international relations, including the one central to our survival as a bastion of Western civilisation. At least in doing this, Mr Albanese is hopefully distracted from further damaging our economy, running down our defences and increasingly making us a lackey of Beijing.

Winning almost two-thirds of the seats in the recent election (albeit with only one-third of the vote) has had a profoundly negative impact. Until this, Mr Albanese camouflaged his hard-left agenda by affecting a ‘reasonable’ centrist position, one much aided by the Aukus submarines on the never-never.

The election result has encouraged him to give effect to the far-left agenda he admits to favouring all his political life.

With the Coalition still finding its feet after the loss in the election – an election which was theirs to win – and with a mainstream media too tolerant of the government and obsessed with publishing anything they can present as damaging to President Trump, Mr Albanese clearly believes the future of his government is assured.

Despite this, the rank and file are not stupid and realise that this extraordinarily endowed country is going downhill  because of the incompetence, naivety and delinquency of too many in the political class and especially in Labor.

This again is a demonstration of the need to empower rank-and-file Australian citizens to make the politicians more accountable, for example, by having a right of recall and a right to initiate legislation. It also demonstrates how dangerous it would be to ever agree to four-year terms at the federal level without citizens being empowered to initiate legislation and recall governments.

The decision on Palestine, based as it is on assurances from the corrupt, antisemitic and brutal Mahmoud Abbas, is not the first time a Labor leader has become seriously involved with some questionable overseas source, with consequent damage both to  the leader and the party. The most notorious examples were by former leaders Dr H.V. Evatt and  Gough Whitlam.

As foreign minister, Dr Evatt’s perceived naivety toward Soviet communism made both the Americans and British reluctant to share secrets with Australia, ultimately leading Prime Minister Chifley to ignore left-wing resistance and create Asio, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, in a successful bid to restore allied confidence.

Despite being leader, Dr Evatt chose the politically perilous path of representing the Soviet-controlled Communist party in a 1951 High Court action to invalidate legislation outlawing the party. This was followed by a referendum where he led the No case, which prevailed narrowly. In the public eye, he was now indelibly linked to the defence of Soviet-controlled communists.

The climax of his ‘unwisdom’ came during the Petrov spying affair when, in the House, he relied on a letter from Vyacheslav Molotov, foreign minister of the bloodthirsty Soviet Union, as proof that the documentary evidence provided by Petrov had been ‘fabricated’. That Evatt accepted this as proof the Soviets were not spying was greeted with ‘disbelief, ridicule, and laughter’. This permanently damaged his credibility. With the disappointment of narrowly losing the 1954 election, his erratic behaviour escalated. During voting on a motion challenging him in the Caucus, he climbed onto a table, instructing his supporters to ‘get their names!’ This culminated in publication of the ‘Doc’s Dossier’ in October 1954, attacking the party’s anti-communist faction, leading to the expulsion of the right wing from the Victorian branch and a split which kept the party out of power for 17 years.

Suffering from a significant mental illness, Dr Evatt was persuaded to resign in 1960 by an extraordinary offer – to be appointed the chief justice of New South Wales. During the last part of his tenure, his declining mental health raised serious concerns with some judgments so incomprehensible they had to be ‘quietly’ rewritten. Unsurprisingly, he took indefinite leave of absence in March 1962, and resigned in October of that year.

The other Labor leader to be involved with a bloodthirsty overseas source was Gough Whitlam. Early in 1976, in the aftermath of his dismissal and a landslide electoral defeat, and with Labor strapped for cash for the next election, he and national secretary David Combe authorised a disastrous plan to secure a substantial clandestine donation from Iraq’s ruling Ba’ath Party.

Whitlam assured bloodthirsty tyrant Saddam Hussein’s emissaries that his dismissal was a temporary setback caused by ‘Zionist pressures’ and that a re-elected Labor government would be more pro-Arab. But the story leaked, the money never came and Whitlam’s reputation suffered.

Mr Albanese’s sudden decision to recognise a non-existent Palestinian state, praised only by terrorists, was based on Hamas propaganda circulated by a delinquent media and exposed as lies. This only reminded the nation that he has had barely any experience outside of politics, and that his politics have centred on close to what Lenin referred to as, ‘left-wing communism, an infantile disorder’. His reliance on assurances from the despised and corrupt Abbas, who is currently enjoying the twentieth year of his four-year term, is at best naive.

If he had to go down this path, it was surely elementary that the conditions Albanese required be fulfilled before recognition. Those conditions – that the Palestine Authority recognise Israel, demilitarise and hold their first general election since 2006 free of Hamas’s influence, and that education be reformed to prevent the incitement of violence and hatred – cannot be enforced and are highly unlikely to be fulfilled.

The result is that the government is granting a major diplomatic concession, potentially damaging to our crucial alliance with the United States and of enormous advantage to an antisemitic terrorist organisation, without any guarantee that the conditions will ever be met.

Little wonder that the US administration is reportedly ‘disgusted’ by Albanese’s folly.