Keneally sinks ALP deeper into oblivion
Chris Kenny
12:00AM September 7, 2019
283 Comments
Either Labor has given up its appetite for government for a while or it has no idea why it lost the election. It seems intent on demonstrating why it posed such a risk for the country that even a delinquent Coalition was able to convince voters it was a safer bet.
On economics and stimulus, energy and climate, it is doubling down rather than reflecting reality, but the worst field of regression is border protection. Less than a decade after at least 1200 deaths on its watch, along with detention centres opened and filled in every state as 800 boats brought 50,000 people into detention, while images of desperate souls dashed against the rocks of Christmas Island were seared on to the national consciousness, Labor shows it has learned absolutely nothing.
Voters would have held doubts all along and had them confirmed, to some degree, by Bill Shorten’s backing of medevac laws before the election. Now all doubt has been eliminated.
So blind is Labor on this issue, so stubbornly unwilling to grasp the basics and put policy ahead of virtue-signalling politics, that it gave the home affairs portfolio to Kristina Keneally, a politician with a penchant for publicity and pontificating but almost zero experience in the security, immigration and foreign affairs aspects of the border security task. She seems to think it is a platform from which to attack the government and promote her career, which is a bit like choosing batting as your test against Steve Smith.
But aside from zeroing in on a signature government strength, Keneally’s tactic highlights Labor’s most egregious policy failure, insults the intelligence of voters who comprehend this dilemma and disregards the will of the people. Labor’s home affairs spokeswoman needs to listen to more Bob Dylan: “She knows there’s no success like failure and that failure is no success at all.”
The former NSW premier has set herself to undo Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison on borders even though they have won the admiration of mainstream voters for restoring the integrity of our immigration system.
Keneally, so far, has managed only to highlight Dutton and Morrison’s resolve, contrasting it with Labor’s skittishness. For 18 years, through two efforts to restore order and break the people-smuggling trade and an unravelling when Labor and the Greens unleashed a humanitarian disaster, this has been a frontline national issue. Yet while some in ALP ranks have grasped the required prescriptions, Anthony Albanese has handed the reins to Keneally, who has little experience or understanding of the issue.
Albanese has allowed his opposition team to be led back down the ALP Socialist Left’s open borders path. Border protection has always been about resolve. Whatever the measures and rules imposed to adapt to difficult circumstances, the critical factor has been having ministers capable of sticking to the plan, adopting a rules-based approach without personalising the issues.
Almost every asylum-seeker, regardless of their refugee status, presents a personal story worthy of compassion and empathy. Most of us, on a personal encounter, would be inclined towards generosity and an exemption from the rules — but the same would apply to upwards of 60 million displaced people around the world.
We cannot take them all and we should not tolerate illegal people-smuggling ventures risking lives, luring victims and making Australia’s immigration choices for us. We entrust governments and their agencies to implement the rules dispassionately on our behalf; the fair and orderly way.
Former Liberal immigration minister Amanda Vanstone wrote in Nine Entertainment’s newspapers this week about how Labor (which introduced mandatory detention) once seemed to comprehend this. When she took the portfolio, Vanstone says an ALP predecessor, Robert Ray, crossed the Senate floor to tell her privately that he would never raise an individual immigration case publicly because he understood these were difficult decisions and such cases were raised publicly only “to pull heartstrings so rules or policies can be broken”.
Yet Keneally addresses a rally to have the rules waived for a Sri Lankan family. She is surrounded by placards — “Let them stay” and “Scomo = fake Christian” — and she plays to Twitter and the ABC. She has a long history of emotive opposition to offshore processing and now ramps up the rhetoric and emotion, questioning the Christian values of Morrison and Dutton. She ought to pick up her Bible and read about the Pharisees.
It is one thing to have sympathy for the plight of the Tamil family (Nadesalingam Murugappan, Priya Nadarasa and Australian-born daughters Kopika, 4, and Tharunicaa, 2) but it is quite another to ignore repeated rulings, all the way to the High Court, that find they are not refugees.
Labor shows no sign it has weighed the precedent an exception might set, or the unintended consequences of such an intervention, or the implications for fairness in the system.
The ALP has worn internal strife and invested political capital in trying to convince its factions and the electorate it understands these issues. It has campaigned in the past three federal elections on the unlikely proposition that it should be trusted to be as unrelenting on offshore processing and border security as the Coalition, even though it would involve implementing policies Labor previously opposed and dismantled.
Now it wants to overturn an individual case that perfectly demonstrates why the Coalition aims to ensure asylum-seekers do not set foot on our shores; because when they gain access to our legal system, even when found not to be refugees, it can lead to years of court appeals. And even then, if they lose, they might refuse to leave.
The refugee activists, the Greens, the Labor Party and, yes, sanctimonious types in the Coali#tion, have been wrong on border protection at every turn for two decades. And they are wrong again.
They inflict torment on individuals, divide the community, demonise opponents, deify each other and continually propose actions that will undermine the nation’s immigration system and risk a return to the chaos, trauma and tragedy that unfolded when they once had their way with border policy.
They never learn. Their ignorance is either deeply embedded or maliciously confected.
It is beyond comprehension that anyone who has lived through the past decade in this country could fail to understand that “stopping the boats” and maintaining an orderly and generous immigration program, complete with a humanitarian intake, is infinitely preferable to enabling the risky, illegal people-smuggling trade.
These compassionistas and their mistakes have been backed all along by the love media. They said dismantling the Pacific Solution would be free of detrimental consequences; then, when boats started arriving, they said there would not be many; then, when there was a rush of boats, they said it was all about push factors; then they said the boats would not stop because the so-called push factors could not be overcome; then they said you could not turn boats back (even though they had been turned back before); then they said if you tried to turn boats back it might spark conflict with Indonesia; then they said Tony Abbott and Morrison could never stop the boats; but when they did, they said rather than stop the boats they had really just turned them back; then they said they supported offshore processing and turnbacks; then they said those in offshore processing should be brought to Australia; when refugees were resettled in America they said that took too long; then they said children should not be detained; when no children were in detention they said the children should come to Australia; then they used their numbers in the parliament to pass the medevac laws and said there would be no dire consequences; and then six boats were turned back from Sri Lanka by our maritime patrols.
And now they say they know best, and that an exception can be made in the case of one Tamil family without unintended consequences. Habitually, unasham#edly and piously, they have been wrong at every twist.
When it comes to George Pell they tell us the judgments of the courts cannot be questioned but when it comes to the Tamil family they say the judgments of the courts cannot be accepted. They want to apply Christian values to help families who are not refugees and therefore deny Christian generosity to families who are genuine refugees. Whenever an individual case makes its way into the public debate, Labor relents on tough border control. And they wonder why they were not entrusted to govern the nation.
They’ve tried attacks on Morrison’s faith before. “I’m not running for pope, I’m running for prime minister,” he was forced to explain during the campaign. The smear didn’t work. On election day I wrote in these pages that if Labor lost, it might move further from the mainstream: “The ALP needs to become more centrist but a loss could see it venture further left.”
And so it goes. With apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Labor is borne back ceaselessly into the past. Eventually, to be fit for government, Labor must comprehend that a generous immigrant nation must have confidence in the integrity of its immigration system.
Chris Kenny
Associate Editor (National Affairs)
Originally Posted by george65
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