CHARLES WOOLEY

The PM missed the target in Tasmania last week when he announced his thought-bubble about forcing immigrants to regional areas like our island state.

You might be both amused and annoyed by our temporary PM’s idea that rather than go straight to nice places like Sydney and Melbourne, new immigrants should be forced to do time somewhere undesirable, like Tasmania. For those of us who think we live in a great place it is surprising to learn people must be compelled to settle here. Last week ScoMo revived our dark past of the penal colony and “transportation to Van Diemen’s Land”.

The PM might not have noticed our housing shortage, our overcrowded hospitals and our small-town traffic problems because he was too busy discussing plans to grow Tasmania’s population to 650,000 by 2050.

Never forget this all comes from the very same advertising creative who brought us the disastrous national tourism campaign “Where the bloody hell are you?”

After the next election, the opinion polls tell us where he will be — licking his wounds down in the Sutherland Shire. You might remember back in the 1990s on Sydney’s southern beaches, aka ‘The Shire’, how the BBC archly and snootily took the piss out of ScoMo’s cashed-up bogan neighbours in a reality TV show called Sylvania Waters.

It vastly amused the Poms by reinforcing all the old preconceptions of Australians as vulgar and uncultured materialists. Perhaps even the sort of chaps who might advertise a horse race on the sails of the Sydney Opera House? This week ScoMo thought that was an OK idea too.

Despite where he hails from, ScoMo possibly cannot escape a certain innate disregard for those of us in regional Australia. He is in the solidly bipartisan Sydney-centric tradition of Australian prime ministers who have long-standing contempt in general for regional Australia and for Tasmania in particular.

Keating infamously pronounced, “If you’re not living in Sydney, then you are just camping”. Gough Whitlam told some travelling pressmen on the way down to Tasmania during the 1975 federal election that if they were lucky they might be in for, “some double-headed fellatio”. He planned to attend a wedding in Launceston so he wittily added an old standard inbreeding jibe, “The good thing about weddings in Tasmania is that there are not so many bloody relatives to meet.”

Guffaws all round from the national press who reported the great man’s comments but not so much amusement from the Tasmanian voters, who days later returned five Liberal MHRs in the 1975 November election.

Before ScoMo’s recent visit we already knew he regarded us as “f***ing mendicants”. It “beggars” belief that he would have even privately said that to our Treasurer knowing it would likely get reported. That really is a measure of his contempt. He doesn’t care.

Now they fully understand the Liberal Prime Minister’s disregard, don’t blame Tasmanians if they return five Labor MHRs at the next federal election. Well perhaps just four along with Denison Independent Andrew Wilkie. We don’t want to lose the one federal member who actually stands up for the joint.

What political game is being played here? I spend a lot of time in Sydney where immigration accounts for 84 per cent of that city’s too rapid population growth and where there’s a strong public perception that it has to stop.

Actually Sydney’s a fraction the size of London and the real problem is a lack of affordable housing and transportation infrastructure. None of that can be fixed before the next election so a bit of dog whistling about stopping immigrants might just save a swag of marginal Liberal seats out in the fractious and frustrated commuter belts. At least it’s a card that ScoMo can play and that Bill Shorten can’t without provoking a revolt on his Left.

So who are the immigrants ScoMo wants to send to Van Diemen’s Land and other undesirable parts of regional Australia?

About 200,000 migrants arrive in Australia every year under different protocols. More than half of these are people who can’t be shunted up the bush because they are subject to employer sponsorships or family reunions. Those jobs and families are mainly in Sydney, Melbourne and south-east Queensland. Skilled people seeking to come here without sponsorship will also gravitate to the major cities for the jobs and the sophisticated lifestyle. Force them to Tasmania and they will chose Hobart over Queenstown and can you blame them? ScoMo seems to have had his epiphany on our West Coast but would an old Shire boy really want to live there?

Humans love cities. Australia exemplifies this as being the world’s most urbanised nation. Despite our vast land mass, two thirds of us freely choose to live in a handful of cities. Unwilling to go bush ourselves perhaps the only people we can force to the frontier might be our 17,000 annual refugee intake.

The problem is refugees understandably seek the comfort of their own communities, admittedly sometimes problematic ones, but at least already well established in Melbourne and Sydney. So if they don’t like the Australian bush and decamp to town how are we going to punish them? The Government hasn’t worked that out yet but in Tasmania there’s always Port Arthur.

ScoMo will likely not be in power long enough to see through the enforcement of what we must hope was just a thoughtbubble. Sending folk from Africa and the Middle East to Queenstown and Zeehan would be most bizarre.

Spontaneity and inspiration is fine in the PM’s role as a Pentecostal church laypreacher but surely immigration policy needs to be more informed, measured and considered.

Now he has seen Tasmania’s wild West Coast the PM should probably check out the refugee camps of Sudan. He would be as shocked as I was when I visited the worst dystopia I have ever seen. The gang-related violence, the casual indifference to human life, the degradation and the sheer appalling absence of any decency presented the darkest side of humanity. It was an experience I will never manage to forget.

I suspect ScoMo’s experience of violence and inhumanity doesn’t extend much beyond the machinations of the Parliamentary Liberal Party, which is bad enough though somewhat less bloody than sub-Saharan Africa, Syria or Afghanistan.

As a Christian, perhaps ScoMo might even be moved to offer refuge to the suffering peoples of those benighted countries. But it would likely be a faraway refuge, perhaps some place like Tasmania. Certainly not in his backyard in crowded Cronulla where clearly there is “no room at the inn”.