James Morrow: Labor loses on credibility when it comes to detainees

Anthony Albanese and Andrew Giles have a long history of being weak when it comes to detainees, and their latest attempts to legislate new powers are more about politics than anything else, writes James Morrow.

Labor’s attempts to come across all tough on borders is about as convincing as a hay fever sufferer announcing that they really – ah-choo! – really enjoy spring.

Sure, the sentiment is great, but no one looks at them and thinks they’re telling the truth.

Consider this: At 7:30am Tuesday, Labor dropped a piece of legislation dealing with immigration detainees into the Coalition’s lap and said they could have a 20 minute briefing on the proposed law’s contents.

What’s important to note is the details of the proposed laws, which will threaten jail time for non-citizens who don’t follow a direction to leave the country, are almost less important than the politics behind them.

Labor, which has been presiding over a slow motion border crisis ever since the NZYQ decision came down last year, desperately needs to give the impression they haven’t lost control of the situation and make Peter Dutton’s team look like opportunistic wreckers.

Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs, Andrew Giles. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

And Tuesday’s stunt comes after the government comprehensively botched its handling of the NZYQ case and the High Court’s entirely predictable decision.

Labor, recall, was caught on the back foot, did not have legislation ready to go when the decision came down, and then compounded its error by being tricky about crimes released detainees were alleged to have committed once they were set free.

So, one imagines that the plan to force the Coalition’s hand by sitting on the bill until the last possible moment might have seemed quite clever within Labor’s tactics team.

Yet it is hard to see anyone falling for it, simply because it is hard to see anyone buying that Labor (with a few exceptions) are big time believers in national sovereignty, much less sending people back who don’t belong here.

Andrew Giles, who is notionally the country’s immigration minister, was inspired to get into politics after he represented Afghan asylum seekers who wound up on the MV Tampa in 2001.

Immigration minister Andrew Giles got into politics after working on cases around the MV Tampa. Picture: ABC Supplied

Naturally he changed his tune as he rose through the ranks: In 2019, when he was made shadow multiculturalism minister, he said, “My views have evolved over time and I think that’s probably true of the party as a whole.”

Yet despite this evolution as recently as 2021, Giles was sharing Guardian articles about the Tampa incident on Facebook, posting that the Tampa crisis “changed me, a young lawyer acting on behalf of the refugees … but what matters is how it has changed us, our politics and indeed our national psyche.”

And that’s before we get to Anthony Albanese.

In 2015, when the issue of boat turnbacks was tearing apart the Labor party, Albanese was reportedly “the most strident” speaker in a left faction meeting about opposing a move by Bill Shorten to support turnbacks when safe to do so, later voting by his own hand against turnbacks.

Australians will be rightly sceptical when this team tries to tighten up borders and the government’s powers to deal with illegal arrivals and over-stayers and criminals who have breached their visas.

Indeed, polls are showing that voters already sense that Labor’s heart just isn’t in this.

Just as their heart isn’t in dialling down net overseas migration.

Recall that in 2022 Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil – who has wisely been giving Andrew Giles wide berth – announced a hike to permanent migration caps.

A boat moored off the beach at Cibangban village in West Java. In 2019, local fishermen said people smugglers had not been active in the area for a long time. Picture: Graham Crouch

Now, the government is fiddling around the margins with student visas, mostly going for the low hanging fruit of dodgy training colleges, as net overseas migration continues to soar.

It’s hard to express how dangerous this is for Labor.

Immigration sits at the crossroads of national identity and the cost of living crisis.

The catastrophic push for a Voice to Parliament, with all its “truth” and “treaty” baggage, sent a not so subtle message that modern Australia’s identity is corrupted and flawed and on some level, illegitimate.

Without a concerted push to mould new Australians into more than just essential workers or overseas students here to swing a hammer or make a payment the foundations of our society will get progressively weaker.

All this is happening against the bigger background of a cost of living crisis, which is exacerbated by huge migrant inflows into the rental market and no realistic way for the supply side of the equation to catch up.

Left unchecked, this has the potential to spiral out of control, economically and politically.

Economically, migration is helping to drive the cost of living crisis, which will have ripples through every sector of the economy, making us less productive in the long run.

Politically, the progressive side of politics has already let itself become infected with undergraduate “settler colonialism” nonsense.

What began with a comically ahistorical attempt to delegitimise Israel on the grounds that the Jewish people (who’ve lived in the area for 3,500 years when not expelled by various Assyrians, Romans, and Arabs) are somehow interlopers is now used to declare Australia illegitimate.

At its most extreme Marxist end, this means any property claims are now come under question, which has led to a bizarre epidemic of squatting in the US where people lose their homes to new and uninvited tenants.

Even without going that far, progressive ideology has never been comfortable with borders or anything that smacks of “exclusion”.