Shorten sails into stormy waters
EVEN his biggest fans would have to admit Scott Morrison has had a patchy start as Prime Minister.
Over the past six months, his polls have hovered between catastrophic and diabolical; his colleagues can’t seem to stay on message; his majority has vanished through electoral defeat and defection; and his predecessor has been hovering around the place like Banquo’s ghost. More worrying for Liberals, however, has been a nagging worry which first surfaced after the Jerusalem embassy fiasco that Morrison might be out of his depth in the top job.
But in a strange and wholly unexpected development, Bill Shorten decided to present Morrison with an open flank on the Labor Party’s greatest weakness and the Prime Minister’s greatest strength: border protection.
As a Liberal Senator observed this week, border protection is for the Labor Party what Medicare is for the Liberals — that is to say a subject on which the public just don’t trust them.
And just as the 2016 “Mediscare” election showed that it doesn’t matter how many times Medicare causes Liberals electoral pain, they never seem to learn the lesson, Labor leaders can’t seem to stay away from boats. Even, it would seem, one as alive to the danger they pose as Shorten who has spent the past five years trying to make sure the public believe there isn’t a cigarette paper of difference between his party and the government on the issue.
Which makes it perplexing that he should have given Morrison his chance with less than a hundred days until the next election. Shorten and his front benchers can and will argue until they are blue in the face that the changes they have sanctioned are modest, limited only to the people who are already in PNG and Nauru and that it is a lie to argue, as Tony Abbott did on Tuesday, that “Under Labor, it’s get on a boat, get to Nauru, get sick and get to Australia”.
But just as the Liberals explained at length that the changes they were contemplating on Medicare before the last election were modest and limited to the privatisation of some back-office functions, this is likely to be lost by the general public as a mere “nuance” as Morrison put it yesterday.
Rightly or wrongly the perception among the public is that Labor can’t be trusted on boats, just as the Liberals aren’t to be trusted with the health system. What makes this worse for Labor and Shorten is that he is facing off against Morrison. If Morrison’s got any credit in the bank with the Australian public at all, it is because he oversaw Operation Sovereign Borders that put the people smugglers out of business.
Labor’s Right Wing understands that and is deeply worried. Ignore their public statements supporting the move; their real attitude is closer to the veteran right-winger who when asked what he thought replied simply: “We are f----d.” That’s no doubt an exaggeration — Labor remains overwhelmingly more likely than not to win in May. Too much has probably gone wrong for this government in the past two-and-half years for it to make up enough ground in the time left to it.
Moreover there is, no doubt, something to Labor’s calculation that five years with hardly a boat has pushed the issue down the pecking order of the public’s hot button issues. Even so, the party is playing with fire. Unregulated immigration is destroying or has destroyed Social Democrat parties across the entire developed world.
In fact you could argue that almost the only place where social democracy is alive and well is right here in Australia and the major — if not the only reason — that the ALP is still in business is because of the success of the country’s border protection regimen.
The collapse of that system would pose an existential threat to Labor in the same way that falling home ownership rates are an existential threat to the future of the Liberal Party. So why Shorten would do anything — anything at all — that threatens it is deeply mysterious. As to the question of whether the changes will actually restart the people smuggling trade, rather than simply stirring fears that it might restart it, of course only time will tell.
The greatest danger, one senior Labor frontbencher explained a few weeks ago, is that by signalling that we are prepared to chop and change the rules, Indonesia may decide that we are not really in earnest and that the co-operation they have shown us on this issue is not worth the effort. That would be a disaster.