One Sunday morning in 1952, the pilot of a light aircraft flying low over the Pilbara looked down and saw what turned out to be the world’s largest deposit of one of the world’s most sought-after minerals. By the time Lang Hancock died in 1992, iron mines, though occupying less than one-fifth of one per cent of Australia’s land surface, had become our greatest source of revenue.

If the pilot of a light aircraft flying low over Sydney one Sunday morning 73 years later had happened to look down, he or she might have seen the world’s largest deposit of another much sought-after natural resource. Some estimates put participation in the pro-Palestine march across the Harbour Bridge at 90,000, but everyone agrees that if it hadn’t been raining so hard it could have been considerably bigger. While Australia cannot yet claim to be a world leader in Artificial Intelligence, we are already punching way above our weight when it comes to Useful Idiocy.

The Bridge protest was by no means the first time Australians have shown an extraordinary appetite for fights in which they have no obvious dog. Historians of an anti-imperialist disposition might characterise the 60,000 young Australians who died in the first world war as useful idiots, for example, not least because unlike their British counterparts they were volunteers, not conscripts. Our roles in the Korean and Vietnamese conflicts are easier to rationalise, in that they helped cement our membership of another empire. But in recent years there have been many less ambiguous instances, much closer to home, of Australian UI in action. In 2020, the centres of our largest cities were brought to a standstill by Australians outraged by the accidental killing of a criminal by police in Minnesota. Three years later, more than 50,000 of us marched across Sydney Harbour to support the LGBT community, undeterred by the fact that homosexuals have not been disadvantaged or discriminated against in Australia for decades and have a higher per capita net worth than heterosexuals.

But it took the present Middle Eastern conflict to reveal just how vast Australia’s UI reserves are. Some commentators have said that in allowing the Bridge protest to go ahead, the NSW Supreme Court – like the politicians and police who saw nothing wrong with the Opera House celebrations on 8 October 2023 – was tapping into a vein of antisemitism which has lain just below the surface of polite Australian society since Federation. I prefer to give the younger marchers, at least, the benefit of the doubt, and chalk their siding with terrorists up to a combination of gaping holes in their education and FOMO; the unquestioning adoption of fashionable foreign causes which used to be part of what we called the cultural cringe.

Although UI will never generate the kind of long-term economic benefits that coal and iron have given us, it is already generating short-term political capital for our leaders. In the last twenty years, Australia’s Muslim population has grown from 280,000 to around 900,000, and Muslim families have approximately twice as many children as the national average. Over the same period, Australia’s Jewish population has stayed around the 110,000 mark and still accounts for fewer than 0.3 per cent of registered voters. But playing to the anti-Israel gallery is not just a seat-winning strategy for Labor politicians. For many of them, the establishment of a Palestinian state is a dream they have had since they were undergraduates, when they were just as prone to FOMO as any of their peers. For most of their working lives, though, they could not openly acknowledge that dream without implicitly supporting the stated ambitions of governments committed to the destruction of the Middle East’s only functioning democracy. As far as middle-Australian opinion is concerned, it is probably too soon to say whether the Bridge protest moved the needle much one way or the other. But without the endorsement of those 90,000 useful inner-city Sydney idiots on the Harbour Bridge, and the sympathetic coverage they got in the equally UI mainstream media, it is hard to imagine Mr Albanese having what my Jewish friends would call the chutzpah to decide, on behalf of the other 27.8 million of us, to recognise the state of Palestine.