Prime Minister Scott Morrison recasts asylum seeker issue as electoral battleground
In his snap press conference at Parliament House on Tuesday night Scott Morrison was focused and formidable - a steely determination and the same gambler’s high-stakes instinct that John Howard showed to refuse entry to Norwegian freighter MV Tampa with 433 stowaway asylum seekers in 2001, writes Miranda Devine.
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In his snap press conference at Parliament House on Tuesday night Scott Morrison was focused and formidable in a way we’ve never seen. He was also oddly relaxed.
Gone was the shambolic daggy dad type who tears up when he talks about flood victims, the accidental prime minister whose desperately divided party only elected him by default, as the least bad option.
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In his place on Tuesday we saw a PM with as much steel in his spine and at least as much chutzpah as John Howard had in his most instinctive moment, back in 2001, when he made the instant decision to reject 433 asylum seekers steaming towards our shores on the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa.
That decision flipped public sentiment on Howard and won him the unwinnable election.
Morrison has the same gambler’s high-stakes instinct.
And he only looked energised by what pundits had deemed to be a desperate loss for his government on the floor of the House an hour or so earlier.
He used the gravity of office and his very real responsibility to maintain Australia’s strong border protection in order to inflict the most diabolical political wound on his opponents.
“We’ve had to clean up this mess twice,” he said.
“Bill Shorten and the Labor Party have made it crystal clear that, at the next election, Australians will be deciding, once again, as they did in 2013, as they did in 2001, about whether they want the stronger border protection policies of the Liberal and National Party or they want the weaker border protection policies of the Labor Party and in 2001 and in 2013, I thought they sent a very clear message.”
In 2001 and 2013 there were crushing Coalition victories, of course.
If the Liberal Party showed itself incapable of learning from Labor’s mistake of jettisoning prime ministers, Labor can’t seem to learn from its own mistakes on illegal boat arrivals either.
During a frenetic day in parliament there was no lily-livered appeasement of the left from Morrison, not even a hint of compromise or sucking up to egotistical crossbenchers to find a middle ground.
He said our national security is at stake, and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton last night was locked in meetings with border force teams to make contingency plans for any new boat arrivals if emboldened people smugglers try their luck.
Reopening the Christmas Island detention centre is on the cards.
And he managed to get across the message that there is “nothing humane” about Labor and the Greens and Kerryn Phelps’ posturing over the so-called medevac bill to outsource border protection to unelected doctors.
“There are more than 60 medical professionals and medical-related staff on Nauru … per head of population … you will find that to be greater than any part of this country.”
Shrugging off a historic vote on the floor of parliament Morrison was clear and unequivocal as he played his ace card.
That’s how elections are won.
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