Labor is doing anything it can to avoid discussing border protection during the election and there’s no prize for guessing why. This election is their’s to lose — and being honest about their border priorities would be a good way to do it.
Border protection is pure poison for Labor, even though the party pioneered asylum seeker detention during the Keating years. But after the Howard government won re-election on border security, Labor did a rapid about-face. When the Rudd government was elected, they immediately dismantled the Howard policies. The inevitable result was that illegals in detention went from one person to tens of thousands, with illegal boats arriving daily. It took another Coalition government to sort out Labor’s mess.
And now Labor want to do it all again. Not that they’ll admit it.
As shadow home affairs minister, Senator Kristina Keneally is Labor’s spokeswoman on policies concerning border protection […] Keneally reportedly told members of the activist group Labor for Refugees in March 2021 she would “welcome an approach … to end offshore processing” if the party assumed government. Notably, she did not deny the claims at first when asked about them by Jayes, saying, “I don’t know what they’ve said, I haven’t seen the document,” before rejecting that she had given such an undertaking.
Whatever the case, her commitment to maintaining OSB is contradicted by her previous statements. “The good news resulting from ‘stopping the boats’ and detaining people offshore isn’t for asylum seekers, it is for us,” she wrote in The Guardian in 2015. “We don’t have to see or worry about them anymore.”
“We as a Labor Party have ceded the ground on asylum seekers and this debate to the conservatives for too long,” she said during her on appearance on ABC’s Q+A program in 2011. “We have allowed the debate to be held on the ‘We’ll determine who comes to this country and in the manner in which they come and we’ll stop the boats’.”
More importantly, many of those who were involved in Labor’s 2007 policy disaster still sit in the shadow cabinet. These include shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus, who boasted in 2008 that it gave him “tremendous pleasure” to say that they’d ended the Howard policies. Tony Burke, Bill Shorten and Richard “I <3 Xi Xinping” Marles all trenchantly criticised boat turnbacks. Brendan O’Connor and Jason Clare both declared turnbacks “impossible and inoperable” — shortly before Tony Abbott proved otherwise.
Penny Wong, Tanya Plibersek, Katy Gallagher and Terri Butler all voted to oppose turnbacks. They’ll all be ministers, too, if Labor wins government.
And then there are the conscientious objectors. Although not in the shadow cabinet, Andrew Giles is the assistant spokesman for immigration and citizenship. In 2015, he unsuccessfully moved a motion against boat turnbacks at the ALP national conference. It was supported by frontbencher and now opposition leader Anthony Albanese. “Unlike other caucus members I won’t just sit there and do nothing,” said Albanese. “This is a red line we cannot cross”.
Yet, now the opposition leader claims to support turnbacks.
Albanese said last month: “We’ll turn boats back”. And then in the next breath: “Turning boats back means that you don’t need offshore detention.” The hapless opposition leader later ‘clarified’ those centres would remain open under a Labor government. Yet in 2015, while trying to present a united front after the conference, he announced: “Everyone in Labor wants to make sure there aren’t turnbacks because there aren’t boats.” Que? When asked last month whether he supported retaining TPVs, he replied “yes” only to claim later he had misheard the question.
They don’t call him “Each Way Albo” for nothing.
Labor also backed teal “independent” Kerryn Phelps’s “Medevac” bill, which allowed illegals to bypass the system with a wave of any random doctor’s pen.
In all, 184 detainees were brought to Australia against the government’s wishes from Manus or Nauru through the bill’s provisions. It was repealed in December 2019 despite the opposition of Labor and the Greens. By that stage none of the 184 were in hospital. Five of that group had refused treatment on arrival and an additional 49 refused an induction chest X-ray or pathology on arrival. A miracle cure, you might say.
The Australian
At least, if Labor gets in, the illegals will be spared the bother of finding a sympathetic, watermelon medico. They’ll just be hand-waved in, regardless.
The boats are probably revving up their motors in Indonesia’s harbours already.
