You’d think Labor would have learned to stay a million miles away from the issue of illegal immigration, by now. No matter what the nosey-nannas and inner-city pearl-clutchers might say, Australians long ago made up their minds about queue-jumpers in people-smuggling boats crashing our borders. Every time it’s been an election issue, Labor has been trounced.
But, no matter how much the leadership want to pretend otherwise, the party faithful are clearly just itching to give it another go.
Labor for Refugees say an incoming Labor government needs to get to the thousands of refugees before they board the boats and point them to the correct pathways to enter Australia.
In other words, offer free plane rides at the Australian taxpayer’s expense to country-shopping grifters. That’s going to go down like a ton of bricks in middle Australia.
“Each Way Albo” didn’t get his name for nothing, though.
Labor has sought to clarify its position, with opposition home affairs spokeswoman Kristina Keneally stressing the party fully supported Operation Sovereign Borders.
“If people attempt to come to Australia by boat, they will not make it. Labor completely supports Operation Sovereign Borders, offshore processing, regional resettlement and boat turnbacks where it is safe to do so,” she told ABC on Tuesday.
But, as disastrously failed Labor politician Peter Garrett unwisely admitted to a journalist, back in 2007: “Once we get in, we’ll change it all”.
But the Labor for Refugees lobby group said if Labor was elected “you can bet” the boats would start again.
The group suggested in response to this, Labor needed to “get to them (refugees) first”.
“There are over 15,000 people in Indonesia waiting to get to Australia,” a post on the group’s official Facebook page said.
“The important thing is that an incoming Labor Govt needs to get to these people first before anyone else and stop them needing to get on boats.
Suddenly, that Facebook post has been scrubbed from sight.
The group said Labor needed to work with refugee agencies to get people ready to come to Australia, give them a fixed timeline on when they would arrive and “diminish” the incentive to get on boats.
The Australian
This is what Labor said in 2007, too. Back then, Kevin Rudd and Julia “Another boat, another policy failure” Gillard sneered at the suggestion that they were opening the floodgates to a wave of illegal immigrants.
When Rudd took office, there was just one person in offshore detention. When Labor was finally booted out again, boats were arriving every day and offshore detention was full to bursting. It took Tony Abbott’s boat turnback policy to put a stop to it all by ending the incentives for people smugglers and economic migrants posing as “refugees”.
The cat is out of the bag: Labor is just itching to put the sugar back on the table.
