Penny Wong's secret meetings with backbench over Gaza aid pause
Labor backbenchers attended two meetings on Monday. Only one was briefed to the press.
As Labor prepared to introduce its stage 3 tax cut reversal to Parliament, a group of more than 20 backbench MPs convened for a very different reason.
With them were Foreign Minister Penny Wong and her assistant minister Tim Watts, before the first Parliamentary sitting day since the government suspended funding for the only body empowered to provide aid to people in the besieged Palestinian territory of Gaza. Wong made the decision after Israel alleged 12 staff members of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) participated in the October 7 attacks. The UN and Palestinian authorities have said the move would only deepen the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
The meeting, kept under tight wraps because of sensitivities within the Labor caucus over the conflict, underscores the difficulty the government faces in preventing party room disagreements from boiling over. And with the government’s overarching aim to prevent simmering social tensions morphing into violence here, the meeting was also designed as a pressure release valve to prevent MPs frustrated by the government’s cautious response from straying too far in public.
Monday was the second time since October that Wong had taken questions from MPs, without staff present, on Labor’s response to the Israel-Hamas conflict. As per procedure, details of Monday’s wider caucus meeting were briefed to journalists by a senior cabinet minister. The separate meeting on the Middle East, held on the same day, was not mentioned.
