Labor must distance itself from Independents on asylum seekers
Virtue-signalling, hashtag-wielding independents may make headlines, but Labor’s chances will be put in peril if they are allowed to weaken our border protection regime, writes Anna Caldwell.
Opinion
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If there’s one thing that rankles Australians, it’s hypocrisy.
When voters see politicians saying one thing and doing another, they start to reach for their baseball bats.
Take the issue of border protection, which is shaping to be a key issue in the coming federal election.
There is a certain irony in wealthy eastern suburbs doctor Kerryn Phelps leading the push to make it easier to transfer asylum seekers off Manus and Nauru on medical grounds.
It’s a policy that Home Affairs advice says will have implications far and beyond helping sick asylum seekers, and would weaken our borders and empower people smugglers.
But Phelps and her supporters in Wentworth don’t welcome too many refugees into their inner-city enclave.
No, it’s not quite like Fairfield in Western Sydney, which welcomes migrants with open arms — despite straining under a lack of the requisite schools or transport to cater for the changing population.
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These are problems not felt intensely in Wentworth, where the biggest hurdle in terms of the population squeeze is where to find a parking spot at Rushcutters Bay or Bronte on the weekend.
In fact, figures from 2010 to 2015 showed that Woollahra took in just 17 humanitarian migrants. In that same period, Fairfield received 5816.
Last year alone, federal government settlement data shows Fairfield took in 1444 humanitarian migrants.
Liverpool took 615 and Blacktown took 230, while Woollahra and Waverley took zero.
Yet during her campaign, Phelps put the issue of refugees front and centre, saying she was “ashamed” of Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers, while groups such as Wentworth4Refugees campaigned aggressively on the issue.
Even state Labor knows migration is an issue.
Former state Labor leader Luke Foley went out all guns blazing a year ago, declaring that “white flight” was occurring in places such as Fairfield, where suburbs lacked the resources to manage ballooning refugee intakes.
Foley was pilloried by the Left for daring to point to a resources issue.
Now, at a state level, both major parties are campaigning on getting a grip on our legal immigration intake for a reason.
Indeed, it’s impossible to consider Phelps’ asylum seeker policy — which legal advice says will open the floodgates — in isolation from the broader population issues the state is facing. Because even if the numbers of potential boat arrivals may be small, weakening border protection and appearing to put activist doctors in charge of policy will aggravate ordinary Australians in suburbs that do more than their fair share to absorb new arrivals.
This was a theme Donald Trump hit hard in his State of the Union address in Washington earlier this week, telling the American people that “no issue better illustrates the divide between America’s working class and America’s political class than illegal immigration. Wealthy politicians and donors push for open borders, while living their lives behind walls and gates and guards”.
Phelps has worked hard to set the moral agenda by telling voters the issues they should care about.
Putting the moral heat on blue-ribbon seats is a tactic also being trialled by independent Zali Steggall in Warringah, with her focus on climate change.
Phelps and Steggall have both attached themselves to fashionable leftists Twitter sentiments, summonsing support from the Left while claiming to be dissatisfied Liberals.
This brings an injection of emotion — and in some cases hysteria — into politics, in some cases at the expense of facts.
It was this paper that first reported last year that the government had legal advice Phelps’ bill would allow asylum seekers convicted of murder and rape entry to Australia.
Labor scoffed at the suggestion. Now we learn that intelligence agencies have warned that offshore processing would be dismantled if Phelps’ bill becomes law.
Up to 1000 asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru would be expected to start arriving within weeks of the bill being passed, the advice said.
The same advice restated that under the bill the Department of Home Affairs could not stop transfers of people with criminal records.
Phelps is on a humanitarian crusade some would deem worthy. However Phelps was not in parliament in the days when asylum seekers were dying as the cruel people smugglers tricked them into trying to make the journey. She was not in parliament when we saw how the evil people smugglers would use any propaganda they could to get desperate people on to boats with no care as to whether they would die as their rickety boats crashed onto the rocks.
This is the very topic Scott Morrison built his political career on.
Phelps is handing the government a political gift in pursuing this ill-thought-out policy.
Labor wants to present itself as being just as tough on border protection as the government, having learnt the lessons of the Rudd-Gillard era, when the party was portrayed as soft.
But the Phelps bill undermines this.
Labor risks losing the war of ideas if it loses ground on border protection to the government.
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