No-one knows exactly how the traditional vocabulary of stage magic developed. Some lexicographers suggest that repetition transformed religious invocations into garbled nonsense syllables that retained a vague association with miracles and wonders, with the “hoc est corpus” of the eucharist becoming “hocus pocus”, the Hebrew ha brachah dabarah (“name of the blessed”) evolving into “abracadabra” and so on, creating an array of phrases that sounded important even though  — or perhaps because  — they meant nothing at all.

Something similar has taken place in Australian politics.

In February, Anthony Albanese responded to Trump’s grotesque proposal to turn the Gaza strip into a luxury resort. “Australia’s position is the same as it was this morning,” the Prime Minister explained, “as it was last year, and it was ten years ago, and as it was under the Howard government: the Australian government supports, and on a bipartisan basis, a two-state solution on the Middle East.”

It’s an important point, particularly as Labor supposedly considers formal recognition of Palestinian statehood. As Albanese says, Australian politicians have backed a two-state solution (TSS) for years. But if the commitment once implied a genuine plan, it’s now purely hocus-pocus, intended only to facilitate a sleight of hand.

In his acclaimed study of reporting on the Vietnam war, Daniel Hallin suggested that political debate in the media could be understood in terms of three concentric spheres. In the centre, he posited a “sphere of consensus”, which he described as the “region of “motherhood and apple pie” … encompass[ing] those social objects not regarded by the journalists and most of the society as controversial.” During the Vietnam war, anti-communism fell into this category, something simply taken for granted by commentators and politicians.

Outside the “sphere of consensus” lies the “sphere of legitimate controversy,” a real allowing the major parties to debate certain subjects on which they disagree. In Hallin’s study, the precise tactics to employ in Vietnam fell within the “legitimate controversy” sphere, with, for example, newspapers giving space to arguments about the efficacy or otherwise of air power. 

Finally, Halin identified the “sphere of deviance”, into which gets relegated all ideas politicians and the media do not consider worthy of discussion. In the Vietnam era, the American media condemned to the sphere of deviance the arguments of the anti-war movement (and, of course, those of the Vietnamese people). As Halin shows, major newspapers and broadcasters excluded any and all critiques of the war until shortly before the American withdrawal, at which point anti-war arguments obtained a certain legitimacy as they were embraced by some mainstream politicians.

In Australian politics, the boundary between legitimate controversy and deviancy about Palesetine is marked by the TSS. If you say you accept the TSS, you can participate in mainstream discussions about Gaza. If you don’t, you can’t. That’s why Trump’s Gaza proposal caused Albanese such discomfort: with it, the President of the United States, a figure central to the sphere of consensus, brazenly adopted deviant rhetoric.

Trump has form with that sort of thing, of course, often flouting long-established protocols, sometimes by accident. But in respect of the TSS, he simply said the quiet part out loud, with his own bizarre plan an acknowledgment that the so-called “solution” will never eventuate.

The possible sites for future Palestinian state have now been thoroughly re-shaped by Israeli settlements, with the backing of Benjamin Netanyahu. Most Israeli politicians approve of Netanyahu’s vow never to permit a Palestinian state. In 2024, an overwhelming majority in the Knesset supported a motion declaring Palestinian statehood “an existential danger to the State of Israel.” During the vote, opposition leader Yair Lapid, one of the remaining Israeli advocates of the TSS, left the building rather than register his opposition. Benny Gantz (often touted as an alternative to Netanyahu) voted with the majority.

Labor’s recognition — if it indeed takes place — of Palestinian statehood won’t change the reality. Recognition might annoy Netanhayhu and his local cheerleaders, which is all to the good. But there’s no conceivable way to make a Palestinian state happen without fundamentally reshaping the region, in ways that the US (and, for that matter, Australia) won’t accept.

The TSS is dead  — and everyone knows it. Why, then, must we pretend it’s not?

The answer relates to its implications.

In apartheid era South Africa, most anti-racists refused “solutions” based on the construction of a “black” state beside the white one, partly because “independence” in the shadow of the nuclear-armed racist regime would never be more than nominal, but also (and more importantly) because of a principled commitment to multi-racial democracy rather than the “separate but equal” logic of the regime.

Australians, more than anyone, should understand why. The longstanding White Australia policy derived from a nineteenth century ethno-nationalism not unlike that on which the old South Africa was based: it identified racial, religious and ethnic homogeneity as fundamental to the nation’s identity. As Alfred Deakin explained, politicians assumed that ‘unity of race is an absolute essential to the unity of Australia’.

Today we (or at least most of us) reject White Australia as grotesque and bigoted; we embrace (in theory, at least) equal rights for all, irrespective of ethnic origin or creed or skin colour. That should, one might think, have implications for Palestine. It should make advocacy for South African-style rainbow democracy — a single state in which all are equal — entirely uncontroversial.

But a single state based on equality would be, by definition, incompatible with the Israeli regime’s old-fashioned ethno nationalism. That’s why the TSS remains so talismanic for the Australian political class. Fealty to the TSS implies that peace necessitates the physical separation of ethnicities, and that a solution requires the creation of states defined on ethno-racial grounds. It doesn’t matter the TSS won’t happen. What’s important is that, when you declare the TSS the only option, you’re saying that, as a matter of principle, different ethnicities cannot live together – and that implies the legitimacy of apartheid.

To put it another way, because the TSS wards the boundary between the sphere of legitimate controversy and the sphere of deviance, it pushes even genuine supporters of the Palestinians to talk in the racialised terms favoured by the Israeli state.

*

We can similar magic governing Australian discussions of climate.

The American magazine Politico recently published an account of the Australian election. Under the headline “Biden Fumbled the Energy Debate. But Another World Leader Won on Clean Power,” it hailed Labor’s victory as a global lesson for “not only how to win on climate-friendly energy policies but how to hold power while executing on them.”

Since May 2022, the Albanese government has approved ten new coal mines or expansions, projects that will over their lifetimes release some 2,449 million tonnes emissions. In the final quarter of 2024, Australia’s exports of thermal coal reached record levels. Last week, the government extended the life of Australia’s biggest oil and gas project, the North West Shelf facility, to 2070. Given the International Energy Agency’s call for a complete cessation of fossil fuel development as the first and most fundamental element of climate action, you might wonder about this global lesson that Australia apparently offers.

Naturally, it’s a trick.

The government burnishes its environmental record with a simple conjuration. Official climate targets focus only on so-called Scope 1 emissions (that is, from domestic use). The exclusion of Scope 2 and 3 emissions (generated from exports) directs attention away, in a technique familiar to every magician, from Australia’s most significant contribution to the climate crisis, the extraction and sale of coal. As policy analyst Chris Wright says,

Right now, a country such as Australia could have 100% renewable energy power generation, but could export considerable amounts of emissions to other countries and still call itself a climate leader. Australia is effectively arguing that the less we use domestically, the more we can sell internationally.

But there’s more to the climate illusion than the Scope 3 bait and switch.

By the early 2000s, the zenith of the neo-liberal era, public outrage about global warming meant respectable politicians could no longer afford justify inaction through out-and-out denial. With climate scepticism increasingly associated with the far right, liberals and social democrats needed a new strategy, one that assuaged environmental concerns without challenging the market orthodoxy to which all respectable politicians adhered.

Environmental scientists James Dyke, Robert Watson and Wolfgang Knorr describe the development of an approach in which as-yet non-existent technologies provided a rationale for delaying reforms in the here and now. Obviously, everyone wants new scientific breakthroughs to reduce climate pollution. But policy makers went much further than mere hoping, incorporating into their models methods for removing atmospheric carbon that had never been demonstrated at scale. Techniques such as carbon capture and storage — theoretically possible but fraught with immense practical difficulties — were treated as established fact, so that the decarbonisation they would hypothetically deliver could reduce immediate targets to politically palatable levels.

“Net zero,” Dyke et al write,

actually means carbon negative. Within a few decades, we will need to transform our civilisation from one that currently pumps out 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, to one that produces a net removal of tens of billions … It should now be getting clear where the journey is heading. As the mirage of each magical technical solutions disappears, another equally unworkable alternative pops up to take its place.

In the days of his lusty youth, St Augustine famously prayed, “please God, make me good, but not just yet.” The pledge of net zero works the same way: using tomorrow’s repentance to facilitate today’s sins.

“We struggle,” the scientists continue,

to name any climate scientist who at that time [ie 2015] thought the Paris agreement was feasible. … Instead of confronting our doubts, we scientists decided to construct ever more elaborate fantasy worlds in which we would be safe. The price to pay for our cowardice: having to keep our mouths shut about the ever-growing absurdity of the required planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal.

As they suggest, Paris allowed the political class to treat the climate catastrophe not as an existential threat but as a minor challenge that need not disrupt business as usual. “Net zero”, like the TSS, became less of a strategy for delivering palpable results and more of a magical spell warding the boundaries between legitimate politics and deviancy. Merely by pledging themselves to net zero, politicians show themselves to be sensible about climate. They don’t have to explain how their policies will prevent disaster: in and of itself, the incantation establishes them as responsible and serious.

Just as he’s done with Palestine, Trump has blithely smashed the established norms on climate, withdrawing from Paris and pulling American (and, to some extent, international) conservatism back to nineties-style denialism. Much of the American political class considers the Trump strategy disastrous. They’re not concerned by its effects on the climate — they know, just as Trump does, that Biden-era policies weren’t going to prevent disastrous warming. They’re worried that it’s politically untenable for the global elite to show naked indifference to a planetary disaster.    

That’s the backdrop to the Politico piece. Politico notes that the Australian election took place “along a broad axis of nominal support for maintaining the country’s net-zero emission goal.” The magazine admires Labor for its pledge to unleash a “renewable energy revolution” while eschewing “any moves away from the country’s considerable and coal and natural gas reserves, which have made it the world’s second-largest exporter of both.” Politico is not concerned by the contradiction between the former and the latter  —nor does it care that the rate of emissions reduction was actually slower under Albanese than under the preceding conservative administrations. What matters is that the Labor strategy preserved net zero as the magical signifier of environmental legitimacy, so that by flirting with nuclear power — and with Trumpism more generally — the Liberals identified themselves with positions deemed deviant.

When Politico says “politicians in other countries around the world would do well to look to Australia for how to turn down the temperature,” it’s not suggesting that by copying Albanese they might prevent environmental catastrophe. Rather, the suggestion is that world leaders might learn from Labor how to revive the old tricks, replacing Trump’s crass extractivism with a more palatable framework with which to continue capitalism as usual.

*

The health ministry in Gaza recently released an updated record of those killed so far by the IDF. Its first hundred pages consist entirely of children aged five or younger. We can append that statistic to scores of other indices (houses destroyed, hospitals bombed, journalists killed, etc) all chronicling the same appalling depravity. Not surprisingly, the list of those describing the war as genocidal now includes human rights groups, politicians, journalists and the vast majority of genocide scholars. “Can I name someone whose work I respect who doesn’t consider it genocide?” said Raz Segal, an Israeli researcher at Stockton University in New Jersey, discussing the scholarly consensus with the Dutch newspaper, NRC. “No.”

The global complicity with the live-streamed horrors inflicted on the Palestinian people will haunt the world for generations, providing a precedent for genocidaires of all stripes. Back in 2024, the Palestinian human rights lawyer Raji Sourani argued that the West’s support for Israel’s atrocities meant that Gaza would become “the graveyard of international law”. This month, the legal scholar Itamar Mann concurred, pointing to what he called “the destruction of international norms” in multiple jurisdictions.

I’ve argued elsewhere about the implications for climate action, given that the mainstream strategies for reducing emissions depend on precisely the liberal norms now shattered by Gaza. Put most bluntly, the situation is this: since the infrastructure of international law, with all the principles that supposedly underpin it, failed to prevent genocide, why would anyone imagine that climate treaties will hold?

What has instead been demonstrated in Gaza is that certain populations — in this case, Palestinians — possess no rights and have no value in the eyes of the powerful. That lesson has obvious implications in an era in which global heating will disproportionately affect the oppressed, the poor and the marginalised.  

Recently, investment bankers Morgan Stanley advised their clients in the financial elite to prepare for warming to reach three degrees above pre-industrial levels. According to Health Policy Watch,

a 3-degree Celsius warming scenario would unleash a cascade of catastrophic consequences, including the displacement of over a billion people, the collapse of ice caps leading to uncontrollable sea level rise, widespread biodiversity loss, frequent and devastating extreme weather events, and the endangerment of critical carbon sinks like the Amazon and Congo Basin rainforests.

Morgan Stanley, however, emphasises the profits that air-conditioning companies might make. It’s an illustration of the calculations we can expect in the years to come, with the horrors inflicted on Gaza today encouraging corporations to believe they get away with sociopathic indifference to ordinary people tomorrow.

We need to think of the future — and that’s why what we do now matters. Ignoring the ritualised invocations about a TSS, we need concrete, immediate action on Gaza, forcing governments, companies and institutions to break ties with a regime facilitating genocide. Each genuine step adds to global pressure to stop the killing but also serves to shift the bounds of the possible, facilitating discussion about democratic responses in Palestine and creating legitimacy for long-term solutions.

So, too, with climate. As the IEA says, every ton of coal that stays in the ground makes a difference. The coming decades will be bad but we can make them less bad by demanding action today rather than relying on miracles in the future.

We need, in other words, to see through the customary illusions – and that’s not  as easy as it sounds.

After all, stage magic works, even if not in the way that magicians claim. A shout of “Abracadabra” might sound meaningless but it successfully distracts us long enough for a card to disappear up a sleeve. People aren’t stupid but conjurers know that audiences want to believe — that they take comfort in spectacular illusions.

So, too, in politics. We’re primed to accept the abracadabras of public life because of the reassurance they provide. When even a cursory glance at the headlines hints at the horrors coming our way, we’d prefer to believe that there’s a plan in place that our leaders have signed up to implement.

Marx described how Germans tried to convince themselves they’d escape the horrors associated with industrialisation in England. “When Perseus hunted monsters,”, he wrote, “he needed a cap that made him invisible. We pull our own magic cap over our eyes and ears so we can pretend monsters don’t exist.”

Unfortunately, monsters do exist, and they’re not dissuaded by make believe. We need, instead, to fight them.

This piece is sponsored by CoPower, Australia’s first non-profit energy co-operative. To find out more about CoPower’s mission, services, and impact funding, jump online at https://www.cooperativepower.org.au/ or call 03 9068 6036 today.

Image: Juan Manuel Sanchez