Even because the Albanese authorities was recognising a Palestinian state on the weekend, it was handing but extra taxpayer cash to an organization steeped within the blood of Palestinians: Elbit Systems.
Elbit is the most important Israeli arms producer, mass-producing drones utilized by the Israeli Defense Forces to kill enormous numbers of Palestinian civilians, and the drone utilized by the IDF to execute Australian help employee Zomi Frankcom and her colleagues in 2024. It has a historical past of manufacturing white phosphorus and was briefly banned by Australia’s Future Fund in 2021 for producing cluster munitions. It has damaged worldwide sanctions to promote weapons to the Myanmar junta after the 2021 coup there.
None of that issues to the Australian Department of Defence, nonetheless. Earlier this week, Defence revealed it was paying $9.7 million for radios to Elbit Systems UK, the British subsidiary of Elbit that has attracted a storm of protesters at its crops throughout England in opposition to the Palestinian genocide. Defence commenced the contract with Elbit UK final week, after a young course of commencing in December 2024 — lengthy after Elbit’s position within the execution of Frankcom by the IDF was well-known.
Defence thus took a transparent choice to reward an organization linked with the killing of an Australian.
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This new funding for Elbit is barely the newest taxpayer handout to Elbit or its subsidiaries: in October 2024, Defence handed almost $700,000 to Elbit’s Australian subsidiary for drone help programs; a month earlier it handed $38,000 to Elbit Australia for safety programs; in April 2024, when Frankcom was executed, Elbit was, aptly, given $160,000 for explosives; it obtained $609,000 in February 2024, two contracts price $3.7 million in January 2024 and a $14 million contract in November 2023.
However, the most important current contract was round $900 million for Elbit to provide turrets to infantry automobiles being constructed by South Korean firm Hanwha, a contract the federal government was caught mendacity about in 2024. While the federal government claimed it had no involvement in Hanwha’s sub-contract, paperwork obtained by Crikey revealed that the federal government had intently vetted and accredited the sub-contract course of.
The authorities additionally lately handed $467,000 for missiles to a different Israeli arms firm, Rafael, which has additionally been focused by protests in Australia and abroad.
The authorities’s enthusiasm for continued funding of corporations deeply concerned in Israel’s genocide in Gaza radically undercuts its posturing on recognition of a Palestinian state. While the popularity has attracted criticism from the Coalition and the Trump administration, it has not been accompanied by any concrete actions to discourage the Netanyahu authorities from its avowed goal of destroying the opportunity of a Palestinian state, by way of ethnic cleaning and colonisation of the West Bank and the extermination of Palestinians in Gaza.
Instead, the Albanese authorities has solely strengthened its rhetoric, albeit nonetheless refusing to make use of correct phrases like “genocide” to explain Israel’s actions.
Indeed, by persevering with so as to add to the income of the Israeli arms manufacturing trade, and refusing to sanction the Netanyahu authorities, Labor’s defence in opposition to the cost that it’s complicit in genocide appears to be like more and more skinny. It might interact within the theatre of concern for Palestinians, however its inaction, and its spending, ship a really completely different message.
