Beware Albo’s border disorder

ANTHONY Albanese’s economic brain fade last Monday might have got all the attention, but it was Thursday’s border protection comments that were much more of a disqualification for office.

Let’s face it, the government influences the economy but doesn’t run it.

Border protection, though, is wholly in government hands; and if the government isn’t up to it, like Labor last time, the boats start coming, people start dying and Australia’s sovereignty is debased.

Anthony Albanese has always been weak on border protection.

In the Howard days, first he was against mandatory detention, even though it was the Keating government that introduced it.

Then he was against temporary protection visas (TPVs), which the Rudd government abolished.

Finally, he was against offshore processing, which even the Rudd government eventually restored, just before the 2013 election.

On boat turn-backs, even after they’d been shown to work, he was still against them, saying in 2015 that he couldn’t support what he wouldn’t be prepared to do himself.

As late as 2018, he still couldn’t bring himself to say that he supported turnbacks, just claiming in a highly convoluted way that he supported the party platform, even though he’d argued against it and tried to vote it down.

Last Thursday’s verbal gymnastics, when he first supported turn-backs but not offshore detention, before claiming to support both, was so damaging because he’s always been in Labor’s bleeding heart wing and has routinely said that you can’t have a strong border security if it’s also weak on humanity.

(As if there’s anything humane about people drowning at sea, or anything humane about people smugglers).

Under Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, “compassion” meant scrapping the Howard government’s border protection policies – putting the “sugar” back on the table for the people smugglers – and the result was more than 1000 illegal boats coming to Australia, with more than 50,000 largely would-be economic migrants on board, and at least a thousand deaths at sea.

When Tony Abbott kept saying there was nothing compassionate about policies that lead to people drowning at sea, Albo was among the first to disagree.

On top of the Howard government policies that stopped the first wave of boats (offshore processing, TPVs and turn-backs), to stop a much bigger wave the Abbott government needed to introduce a unified command structure (through Operation Sovereign Borders), a news blackout on people-smuggling operations, and – most importantly – big orange lifeboats to safely send illegal arrivals back to Indonesia.

The lifeboats were instrumental in the success of Operation Sovereign Borders because the people smugglers had started to scuttle the original boats close to Australia’s waters, forcing our navy to (rightly) save lives but, at the same time, do the smugglers’ bidding by delivering their clients to Australia’s jurisdiction (and kicking off years of activist-supported legal claims through the courts).

After last week, no one can credibly claim a Prime Minister Albanese would have the inclination, the fortitude or the consistency to keep these policies.

Especially if he’s reliant on the Greens for support in the parliament, as he almost certainly would be. Almost from day one of a Labor government, the people smugglers would be putting boats to sea, confident they could overcome a resolve so feeble it flip-flops within a couple of hours in response to media pressure.

Labor’s current border protection shadow minister, Kristina Keneally, has been as weak and inconsistent as her leader, particularly on the issue of TPVs.

In any event, just as Labor can’t say who will be the defence minister if they win, Albanese isn’t able to confirm Keneally in home affairs; although some like me see that as a blessing.

It’s crystal clear that in order to maintain a border protection strategy that the rest of the world (sometimes secretly) admires, and (in Britain’s case) is starting to copy, you need all three major policy elements (turning boats around, TPVs and offshore processing).

Yet Labor can’t help pandering to people who think everyone who wants to come to Australia has a right to do so.

As recently as July 2018, grilled over his position on turn-backs, Albanese first said that he now supported the party platform. After then admitting he’d voted against turn-backs, and asked what he’d do next time it came up, Albanese merely said: “I’m not dealing in hypotheticals.”

On border protection policy, as on economic policy, the Opposition Leader now wants Australians to think that he’s changed and that Labor has changed – so that, this time, voting Labor is a “safe change”, not a risky one.

Unfortunately for him, every time he looks confused or ignorant, he ends up reinforcing suspicions that Labor hasn’t really changed at all.