They haven’t stopped the boats, but they have stopped you hearing about the boats. Which is an achievement in itself.
Immigration Minister Scott Morrison’s boats blackout — gagging Customs on reporting each asylum-seeker sea arrival in favour of a stage-managed weekly briefing — is tricky politics. It might also be the most generous concession he’s made on the issue.
The stream of statements on boat arrivals strangled Labor and fed community xenophobia. Every new boat was a brand-new story on the government’s failure, on our unprotected borders, on the worthiness of asylum-seeker claims, on the cost of housing them, race assimilation in Australia, and above all the need to Do Something about the flow. We had to Stop The Boats, because the problem was Out Of Control.
Make no mistake, this is a government trying to manipulate the media to support its policy objectives. They vowed to stop the boats, and if they keep coming Morrison wants to hide it. If Labor pulled the same trick the howls would have been deafening — we await the outrage from Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman and the like about the government trying to cover up the problem.
But what this issue always needed was some perspective. Perhaps stopping the flow of statements, if not the boats, will help.
Crikey, your last paragraph is outrageous. If that is the best you can do, I’d give the game away. I thought Crikey was in the business of INFORMING its’readers.
Obviously NOT!!
What absolute tripe! As if they can stop the flow of info on
boat arrivals by running away from pressers and attempting to muzzle the MSM.
As soon as Morrison tried this tactic, twitter found a willing informant in @gordonthomsonci
(General Secretary Union of Christmas Island Workers Councillor Shire of Christmas Island)
Given the hairy chested breast beating from Abbott & Co, it’s hard to imagine the Indonesians being terribly sympathetic or even a *little* bit cooperative.
This clumsy censorship won’t stop the flow of info. It’ll just inflame the conspiracists to even greater flights of paranoid fantasy.
Of course freedom of information should be maintained as a high principle, particularly in a democracy. But in this case the suppression of information, as bad as it is, may nevertheless benefit asylum seekers in reducing the pressure to introduce ever more inhumane policies to try to stop the boats.
Can you manipulate a media that doesn’t want to be?
Piers Akerman has already desribed on the Insiders the manipulation of the media to support the government’s ‘Stop the boats’ policy objectives as an “operational issue”.