The Australian’s Greg Sheridan is the classic LINO: the supposed ‘Christian conservative’ who went all-in on gay marriage and staunchly defends mass immigration. And of course, he just swoons in horror at that awful Donald Trump. He’s long fallen in line with the tilty-head set on ‘refugees welcome’, too. So, of course, he joined the right-on conga-line of condemnation when John Howard had the temerity to defend our territorial sovereignty by turning a boatload of Middle-Eastern freeloaders right back to Indonesia.
Only now, a quarter of a century too late, has Sheridan finally conceded that Howard was right all along.
In the case of the Tampa incident, 25 years ago, John Howard established effective border control for Australia. At the time I thought he badly over-reacted to a small situation, but he was much more right than wrong. As a consequence, there’s little illegal immigration to Australia by boat. The lasting tribute to the policy is that both sides of politics enforce it today.
So it only took a quarter-century for the foreign affairs editor of the national broadsheet to discover that a nation is allowed to control its own borders. That should have been the end of the sermon. Of course, it isn’t.
The facts were never complicated. A leaking Indonesian boat packed with 438 mostly Afghan ‘asylum seekers’ foundered in Indonesia’s search-and-rescue zone. The Norwegian freighter Tampa plucked them out. The nearest suitable port was Indonesia. Indonesian authorities told the captain to take them there. Under ordinary maritime practice, that is exactly what should have happened.
Instead a delegation stormed the bridge, threatened harm to themselves and the crew and demanded Christmas Island. That is not a refugee’s plea. It is coercion of a merchant captain on the high seas. Howard’s response – SAS on the deck, Nauru for processing and nobody rewarded for jumping the queue – was legally and morally unassailable. He killed the people-smuggling trade: at least, until Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard unravelled the policy and the boats and the drownings returned. Tony Abbott restored it. Labor, having learned the hard way, now pretends it always agreed.
Sheridan’s original opposition was not an argument from law or fact. It was never anything but tilty-headed feelings.
I judged Howard far too harshly at the time and I was wrong about the basic need for national governments to assert full control over their borders.
He was a child of the Cold War, he explains, when refugees fled communist tyrannies and the West still carried guilt over the Jews of the 1930s. Except that the country-shopping grifters of the 21st century are nothing like the same. Not only in their motives, but in the hateful culture they bring with them and refuse to leave at the border.
Applying that paradigm to people movements in the 21st century was out of date, wrong on the facts, unworkable and morally confused.
If only, golly, someone had tried to tell him. Except that we did: to no avail. The entire ‘refugee’ debate has remained stuck in that same sentimental time-warp ever since.
Yet even in recantation Sheridan cannot drop the moralising. He still tuts that Howard “needlessly demonised” the people on the Tampa, “who were distressed human beings”.
Distressed human beings do not seize a ship’s bridge and dictate its destination and distressed human beings do not treat a rescue as a taxi to the welfare state. Call it what it was: aggression dressed up as pathos.
The same cheap piety was on display abroad. Norway spent the week lecturing Australia. New Zealand struck the same pose. Yet both take a fraction of the refugee load as Australia. No one died in Howard’s operation or in Abbott’s. When Labor went soft, hundreds drowned.
You tell me: who was really humanitarian?
Indonesia, which could not say so in public, was quietly delighted. The boats were Indonesia’s problem as much as ours. Howard and then Abbott solved it for both countries.
Sheridan edges towards the part the tilty-heads still refuse to name.
Unregulated Middle Eastern immigration to Western countries has not been an unqualified success. The long traditions of Islamist antisemitism and extremism have posed real problems.
That is as close as a LINO comes to a confession. The long-term harvest of flooding a country with barely-vetted arrivals from that particular civilisational zone is not a food festival. It is the Jew-hatred that marched after October 7 and culminated, in December last year, in two ISIS-inspired gunmen murdering 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach. Howard was not “demonising individuals”. He was declining to import a political religion that has never made its peace with the West.
All countries now want the borders Howard built in 2001. He was ahead of the game. The nation is in his debt. Sheridan has admitted the first half of his error, only a generation late.
Who knows? Having managed that, he might one day admit he is wrong about Donald Trump… oh, say, just in time for the United States’ 300th birthday.
