PACIFIC DEMISE THE REAL GOAL

LABOR last week proved it’s learned nothing from the last time it weakened our border laws. But so have its media mates. Take The Age newspaper, long a Bible of the Left.

In 2008, it cheered as Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd scrapped the “Pacific Solution” — the detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island that the Howard Government used to stop the boats. “Yesterday a stain was removed from the soul of this nation,” The Age declared. Except, of course, the real stain — a stain of blood — is what followed.

Rudd’s decision told illegal immigrants everywhere our gates were open, and 50,000 sailed right in. Another 1200 drowned trying, and for months I noticed, as I documented each new sunk boat, that The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and ABC failed to record the mounting death toll of the policy they’d endorsed.

Now history repeats, as journalists and commentators last week cheered Labor’s latest weakening of our borders, too. “No more than base-level decency,” crowed Sydney Morning Herald columnist Peter FitzSimons.

“Four female MPs helped defeat the government and save asylum seekers’ lives,” cried Mamamia’s Belinda Jepsen, mixing identity politics into her hyperbole. Guardian Australia political editor Katharine Murphy hailed Labor’s “decision to project some basic humanity in an election year”. The Liberals’ opposition showed “fear and xenophobia”, tut-tutted SMH political editor Peter Hartcher.

The Age joined in the praise of Labor’s law, forced through Parliament with the Greens and independents.

“It is an immediate medical solution to an urgent medical problem,” its editorial said, ignoring that Nauru has one medical professional for every seven illegal immigrants, and we already medevac the sick here if necessary.

“Medevac does not weaken our borders,” The Age insisted, even though its own reporters had just interviewed former people smugglers who said Labor’s weakness would make smugglers “want to send one, two, three, four, five, six, seven boats every week, twice a week” once it won government.

So how to stop them? Labor’s media shills offer two fixes.

First, suggests The Age: “The turnback policy is cited by experts and insiders as the most effective deterrent ... It would be prudent to buttress this barrier.”

Pardon? Turning back boats is the Tony Abbott policy which The Age was still damning in 2015 as “morally repugnant”, and “ruthless and despicable”. It’s a policy many on Labor’s Left still hate.

So why did turnbacks go from “morally repugnant” to something The Age wants more of?

Why? Because The Age knows Labor has put sugar on the table for the people smugglers, and if boats now turn up it could lose the unloseable election.

That’s why many Leftist journalists also insist Prime Minister Scott Morrison stop saying Labor has weakened our borders.

He’s giving people smugglers ideas, they say. Guardian Australia’s Murphy even accused Morrison of “looking like you are whistling up new boats for a bit of cheap partisan advantage”.

How crazy. The Liberals now can’t inform voters that Labor’s policy is dangerous?

And how dumb do journalists think the bosses of those multi-million-dollar people smuggling cartels are? They don’t need Morrison to tell them what Labor has done — especially not with activists celebrating at high decibels.

Nor are they dumb enough to trust journalists such as long-time Fairfax columnist Mark Kenny, who on the ABC yesterday parroted a popular media meme: that Labor’s medevac law applied only to illegal immigrants already on Nauru and Manus, so Morrison should inform smugglers “Australia still has strong borders”.

True, Labor did hastily limit its law, but are smugglers seriously meant to believe that new boat people sent to Nauru won’t also be flown here for urgent care?

Would they seriously believe Labor and the Left would now leave new arrivals on an island they’ve damned as a living hell?

After all, the whole point of Labor’s law was to give activist doctors an excuse to fly in everyone on Nauru and Manus, whether sick or well.

Last December, The Age was — for once — perfectly frank about this rort, when praising independent MP Kerryn Phelps for designing it.

“The moment has finally arrived to abandon Australia’s internationally condemned mandatory offshore detention,” it announced.

Parliament would “have a bipartisan opportunity to close one of the most shameful chapters in the nation’s history, when … Phelps introduces a private member’s Bill…”

That’s the whole sham exposed. The media Left isn’t backing just a limited medevac plan.

Its real goal is to destroy the successful Pacific Solution a second time, and by whatever it takes.