Reporter
Canberra
Liberal MP Josh Frydenberg has savaged Former foreign minister Bob Carr’s patronage of Labor Friends of Palestine. Source: News Corp Australia
LIBERAL MP Josh Frydenberg has savaged Bob Carr’s patronage of Labor Friends of Palestine, branding the “lazy” former foreign minister an “opportunist” and a “dilettante”.
Mr Carr’s decision to take up a prominent role for a new ALP group pressing for Palestinian statehood comes almost 40 years after Mr Carr launched Labor Friends of Israel with Bob Hawke, believing then that “Arabs were terrorists”.
Mr Carr, premier of NSW for a decade before his stint as a federal minister, said Israel had changed and accused fanatics in the country’s government of promoting “apartheid”.
“It has become virtually impossible for the centre-left in politics to maintain support for the ‘ethno-nationalists’ who are now opposed to a Palestinian state and back expansion of Jewish settlements in occupied territories,” he said. “Social democrats find this impossible to live with.”
Mr Frydenberg, parliamentary secretary to Tony Abbott, this morning savaged both Mr Carr’s new appointment and his political record during an interview on Sky News’s Australian Agenda.
“This grandstanding by Bob Carr is all about him. It’s nothing more than an obsession on Bob Carr’s part,” Mr Frydenberg, the government’s only Jewish MP, said.
“He is a real opportunist. He’s been silent as we’ve seen ISIL or ISIS go ahead and engage in beheadings in Iraq and Syria and butchery and genocide but he’s just obsessed with the Israel-Palestinian issue and I just think it’s because he’s got relevance deprivation syndrome.”
Mr Frydenberg accused Mr Carr of being a “lazy” and “a dilettante” as foreign minister.
“I agree with Julia Gillard,’’ Mr Frydenberg said. “Bob Carr should never have been appointed foreign minister. He was lazy and he did nothing in that job,” Mr Frydenberg said.
“I also agree with Julie Bishop that Bob Carr is a dilettante as we saw through his diaries, talking about his steel abs and his preference for first class pyjamas on his tours and trips around the world where he pretended to be Australia’s foreign minister.”
Mr Frydenberg denied the government was under pressure to recognise the state of Palestine, as Sweden did last month.
“Tony Abbott has proven himself to be a steadfast friend of Israel and that’s because he understands that Israel is a democracy and understands Australia’s values,” Mr Frydenberg said.