CANBERRA: Federal Opposition Leader, SSussan Ley, has stormed out of a news conference in Parliament House after being asked about the possible recognition by Australia of a Palestinian state, but not before declaring she sees no problem with her being paid to appear in a new advertising campaign.

Mss Ley has signed a deal to front a nationwide advertising effort by the Specsavers optometry chain following her comments yesterday in which she failed to join Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and other world leaders in recognising and calling out Israel’s illegal and genocidal use of starvation as a political weapon against Palestinians in Gaza. (main picture)

A spokesperson for Specsavers said Mss Ley was an ideal choice to be the face of the chain’s latest advertising efforts.

“For us it was close-run thing between Mss Ley, shadow foreign minister Senator Michaelia Cash, and Liberal frontbenchers Dan Tehan and Senator James Paterson when deciding who was best to sign up for the campaign,” the spokesperson said. “But in the end we thought Mss Ley was the best choice.”

During a brief appearance at her news conference this morning, Mss Ley said she would fully declare all income she received from the Specsavers campaign.

But she then became visibly agitated when quizzed about the possibility of Australia joining other nations led by France in recognising a Palestinian state at a September meeting of the United Nations.

Reporters replayed for Mss Ley a video of her speech to Federal Parliament in September 2011 – when she was co-chair of the parliament’s Friends of Palestine group –  in which she clearly declared her backing for recognition of a Palestinian state.

In that speech, as the video showed, Mss Ley had said: “I support the Palestinian bid for statehood in part because it will give heart to the ordinary people of the West Bank and Gaza…. we in the international community must stand in solidarity with those seeking the non-violent path to a secure Israel and an independent Palestine. After two generations of strife and war, are we going to admit to our children that their parents could not even find a path to peace or, worse still, that we did not even try?”

In her 2011 speech Mss Ley also said of the treatment of Palestinians by Israel: “It is as if the Palestinians have been airbrushed out of existence.”

She had ended her speech by declaring: “As I return to my rural electorate, I will recall the [Palestinian] farmers we met who have been chased off their land and livelihood by illegal [Israeli] settlers and are now mendicant aid recipients.”

Mss Ley did not respond to questions about the speech but quickly gathered her notes and ended the news conference while declaring that she would seek an official parliamentary into the “hacking of the Hansard website and the use of AI to impersonate me, all clearly the work of Hamas”.

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