Rather different takes on asylum seekers in The Oz today. Dennis Shanahan thinks the Government has out-manoeuvred the Coalition again; Christian Kerr thinks the Government is panicked, their strategy in “tatters”.
Kerr is closer to the mark. The Government is clearly rattled. Oddly, though, it hasn’t been rattled by the Coalition, which has its own problems on asylum seekers. It seems more scared by what might happen on the issue rather than what has happened. This is the downside of Kevin Rudd’s conservative political tactics. When you see everything as a potential risk to be managed, you can end up jumping at shadows.
And this particular shadow extends all the way from 2001.
If you want evidence that the Government is rattled, look at the top. The Prime Minister has been all over the place rhetorically. Normally metronome-like in his uses of key messages, Rudd tried several arguments and had to spend time explaining why he referred to “illegal immigrants”. It’s minor, but Rudd is normally perfect in his messaging.
He has insisted on trying to explain that the number of boat arrivals is comparable to the average number of arrivals during the Howard years, a line no one will buy. He has been trying to get “tough and humane” up as one of the Government’s keyword terms, without much success. Yesterday he was shrill in response to those Tuckey remarks about blowing up oil rigs, when he should have drawn attention to them and let the media do the rest.
Belatedly, last night he appeared to find his rhetorical feet on The 7.30 Report , emphasising what he calls the “spectrum” of factors at work behind the arrivals and why it was important to address all of them. It’s also the line the Government has been using the longest, emphasising its strong regional relations and Rudd’s relationship with the Indonesians.
Whether that will be enough if the boats keep coming remains to be seen.
Malcolm Turnbull has had communication problems of his own. Employing the increasingly common tactic of calling a 1.45 press conference on a sitting day – meaning he only need face a handful of questions before declaring he has to bolt to Question Time – he blundered when asked what the Coalition would do. “What I would do is not have a policy that fails,” he declared forthrightly. The sound of foreheads being smacked in the Prime Minister’s Office could be heard even in the Opposition Leader’s courtyard. Of course! A policy that actually works!
When he eventually moved a censure motion in Question Time, Turnbull spent part of it actually censuring Wilson Tuckey, before getting onto the intended target, the Prime Minister. Turnbull devoted a considerable period to the issue of “push factors”. For a long while, the Coalition has concentrated solely on the “pull factor” of the Government’s changes to the asylum seeker processing regime. Turnbull yesterday shifted the argument to arguing that there were push factors, but there were always push factors, it was how governments reacted that was the issue.
It’s not a bad argument for the Coalition to run with, but it’s too complicated to help them with voters who might be swayed by such matters. “The push factors are enormous. They have always been enormous” not merely lacks the bite of “we will determine who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come” but it sounds like an endorsement of the Government’s argument that there are overseas factors at work in boat arrivals beyond its control.
In truth both sides look uncomfortable grappling with this, like performers who know their lines but feel ill-at-ease saying them. But given the parlous state of the Coalition, anything on which they don’t cop a beating from the Government at the moment is a good thing.
I haven’t heard anyone (recently) from Government having a go at the opposition about wanting to “lock up children” in detention centres – obviously a reference to the previous practice that the Howard government eventually changed ‘late in the day’.
Could it be that the Goverment doesn’t want to “lock up children” because they would prefer Indonesida does it? In substandard detention centres??
Both sides are ‘all at sea’ on this because it appears no-one really knows which way the great “unwashed masses” (ie the electorate) will fall on it.
How to tell the difference between Rudd’s and Howard’s policies
Apart from the fact that Kevin Rudd and John Howard look different from each other – a child could probably tell them apart physically – the average adult might already have some trouble telling their asylum-seeker policies apart. In his article in the Australian “Boat People paint PM into a corner”, Sheridan sets about trying to establish some difference, but the words are clumsy and unconvincing:
It doesn’t matter if the job is hard and the materials poor. If you repeat that Rudd is ‘right to take a tough line against illegal immigration’ often enough, people will begin to think that this is somehow the crucial point of Australia’s population policy.
There is a gem here, though, which you might miss if you began to nod off before you got to the end of Sheridan’s article (and who could blame you)?
Right at the end, Sheridan writes this amazing assertion, that Rudd is
What does this tell the alert observer? Well, it sounds to me like a message to the old Liberal-National voters who worry that the ALP has got in and that dear old Howard got the boot. It’s telling them, “You don’t need to worry. Rudd isn’t really the Labor Party. It isn’t really a Labor Government as long as Rudd ‘dominates’ it.
Clearly the Murdoch Press is pleased with Kevin Rudd’s performance to date and they don’t regret the departure of Howard, although they know that some of their readers still do.
On the other hand, what should Labor sympathisers think about this?
In my opinion, they should be worried! If they weren’t already. But not because of Rudd’s attitude to asylum seekers. They should be worried that Rudd is overpopulating this country legally to the satisfaction of the growth lobby. As if that were not bad enough, he shows contempt for refugees by allowing a gigantic stream of legal immigrants in but almost no refugees. If that doesn’t tell you that the main interest the growth lobby has in immigrants is their money, then you are not reading the signs correctly.
At the same time we can see that Mr Sheridan has become an apologist for geographically distant refugee determination detention facilities because Mr Rudd is running into problems accommodating asylum-seekers.
Mr Rudd is also running into problems accommodating Australians, so perhaps we will soon hear that a few gulags will be built to house the more unruly homeless and unemployed, not to mention those who demand democratic government, under those Howard government terrorism laws that the Rudd government also embraces.
There is more about this at Growth Lobby but feel free to moderate if this is one link too far.
Rudd’s famous coining of the place in the mind “Brutopia” and his rhetoric about WorkChoices was enough to convince most of his support base, including Guy Rundle, that fundamentally he cares even if he gets a bit cross sometimes. Someone so nerdy just couldn’t be bad.
But Rudd’s hunger for power and adulation shows no limit. He may be a wolf in sheep’s clothing where Howard was at least a wolf in wolf’s clothing.
In contrast, Turnbull: “What I would do is not have a policy that fails.”
And some months ago in the National Press Club, when asked what’s a hard decision he would make: “Well I’ll tell you an easy decision I would make, and that’s not to treat parliament with contempt.”
Turnbull may be a sheep in wolf’s clothing.
I just heard Alan Jones squawking in a rebroadcast of his morning show – he’s convinced (in effect) David Hicks and Jih*d Jack Thomas were asylum seeking boat people. And Osama Bin Laden will be on the next one for sure, Alan told me!
And those Sydney guys convicted of terrorism? Alan says “They got here somehow”. Several times, nod nod, wink wink.
So Alan, how did they get here? Family reunion by plane? How did the 9/11 hijackers get into the USA? Over the Mexico border on foot through the desert, or was it … business migration programme, by plane?
Come on old boy, I know you’ve been sick, I won’t be mean. Just tell us how the terrorists for real got to Australia. Otherwise we will know your latest squawking is just another dose of Liberal Party viagara before you go all wrinkly and limp again, to be sent on viking boat ride of your own. Sooner the better.
Someone should inform Alan Jones, that the numbers who are without legal consent came by plane – 26 times more arrive by plane. His hysterical nonsense about arriving by boat is just that. Any person with even a hint of intelligence knows, that a would be terrorist wouldn’t come in a shonky boat, spend time in a detention centre while your bonafides are being investigated, and then maybe, if you slipped through the security checks can then proceed to plot and plan. what rubbish? If the FBI had been on the job, the alleged terrorists of 9/11 would’ve been picked up earlier. Nobody at the FBI took the phone calls seriously, or maybe they had another agenda????
As for sheridan. Anyone who takes anything he says seriously after his drunken public behaviour at those awards is as bad as he is, and his colleagues at the Murdoch stables are the same. They give journalism a bad name! Can’t stand any of them; wouldn’t even wrap my chips in those rags. They push the ultra right all the time. They’re racist and never let the truth spoil their agenda – support corporate wealth, greed, anti-human rights, they’re sexist, racist and use sensationalism to sell their garbage etc. Why waste your time SHEILA?