James O’Doherty: Labor fails the test on citizenship ceremonies
Labor strategists are doing everything they can to oust Dai Le, but if they play too dirty Labor might end up covered in the mud they are trying to throw, writes James O’Doherty.
Opinion
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It is hard to think of a more prominent member of the Australian Vietnamese community than Dai Le.
The Fowler MP, a migrant refugee who arrived from Vietnam in 1979, even wore an áo dài made from an Australian flag design for her first speech, to represent her two cultural identities.
Why, then, did Prime Minister Anthony Albanese not deem her worthy of attending his official residence for a celebration of the Vietnamese community’s contribution to Australia over the past 50 years?
And why was her Labor opponent, Tu Le, invited?
The answer can only be that Labor is pulling out all stops to unseat the crossbench MP from Fowler, which it embarrassingly lost after trying to parachute Kristina Keneally into the electorate in 2022.
The latest snub comes hot on the heels of Dai Le declaring that she was not invited to celebrate residents in her electorate becoming citizens at Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke’s industrial-scale citizenship extravaganza in Olympic Park. That, too, was entirely political.
It’s exactly what it looks like, a mass-scale citizenship ceremony to sign up new voters before the election,” one Labor source said.
It was so brazen that it would almost be funny, if the impacts were not so serious. In fact, Labor sources that I spoke to last week and this could only laugh at Burke’s hubris.
Here was a Home Affairs Minister instructing his department to welcome almost 13,000 Australians in the months before the election during a “window” in which he was available to preside over the ceremonies.
Officials from the Australian Electoral Commission were on hand to ensure those new citizens did not leave before knowing of their right and responsibility to vote.
If that wasn’t enough, Burke stacked out the crowd with enough elected Labor representatives to rival a fundraiser at a Sussex St Chinese restaurant.
Werriwa MP Anne Stanley, Reid MP Jerome Laxale, Parramatta MP Andrew Charlton, Senator Tony Sheldon, Labor councillors, they were all there.
Labor’s Fowler candidate also scored an invite.
The only federal MPs who technically required an invite to the Olympic Park bonanza were Reid MP Sally Sitou (the local member), and a Senator from the opposing party – in this case, the Liberals’ Andrew Bragg.
They were invited by department bureaucrats, although Bragg’s invitation only arrived two days before the event took place.
The other Labor figures were invited by Burke’s office.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese calls the entire affair a “complete non-story” and Burke argues that his critics should be more “patriotic” of those taking a pledge of commitment to Australia.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with migrants eligible for Australian citizenship choosing to make that pledge: It should be celebrated, and they should enjoy all the rights and responsibilities that citizenship brings.
What is on the nose, however, is the fact that months before the election, the minister directed his department to churn through citizenship conferrals during a specific window in which Burke could personally congratulate our newest voters.
But if Burke believed that the conga-line of Labor MPs at his industrial-scale citizenship ceremonies would boost the Albanese government’s chances of re-election, he could be mistaken.
I’m told that the backlash has been noticeable, coming up in discussions with voters.
Burke insists that he has no idea how the thousands he gave citizenship to will vote, and has denied “fast-tracking” new migrants to “stack” new voters into marginal seats.
RedBridge director and former Labor pollster Kos Samaras is also downplaying the impact.
“Proportionally that list would split evenly between the Coalition and Labor,” he says.
“The electoral benefit of being present at these ceremonies is fairly minimal.”
Where Labor surely hopes it will benefit from this citizenship blitz is in Fowler, about which party officials are still embarrassed.
How else can Burke explain his speech at a fundraiser for Labor’s candidate on Friday night, held hours after Tu Le was posing with new citizens?
Describing Tu Le as “cabinet material,” Burke appeared to suggest that incumbent Dai Le was opposed to new migrants becoming citizens.
“I never thought I would see the day when the representative for Fowler was on radio today criticising the government for holding citizenship ceremonies,” he said.
“The electorate of Fowler deserves someone who’s proud of people coming to Australia, starting a new life here, and making a pledge of commitment to Australia; and those are the values of Tu Le.”
Labor strategists are doing everything they can to oust Dai Le, believing she would deliver Peter Dutton a crucial vote in the event that neither side wins enough seats to win outright.
But if they play too dirty, Labor might end up covered in the mud they are trying to throw.
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