Miranda Devine: Electing Anthony Albanese would put faux compassion chumps in charge
If Anthony Albanese wins the election the boats will start again, because people smugglers know Labor is weak on borders, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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It didn’t take long for the wheels to fall off the Albo coronation project.
That’s the point of an election campaign.
The spotlight goes on the candidates for a few weeks and the way they respond under pressure gives you an indication of how they will fare as PM for three relentless years.
It’s a stress test for the toughest gig in politics. Too bad for Anthony Albanese that he can’t hide in a basement under cover of Covid like Joe Biden did during America’s 2020 election campaign.
The Australian system is ruthlessly revelatory and a long campaign allows the media plenty of opportunities for scrutiny and gotcha questions.
Albo has had a kid gloves press since ascending to the Labor leadership, so he isn’t as battle-hardened as Scott Morrison, who has been beaten to a pulp during his prime ministership, often in such an unfair fashion you suspect nothing but a media thirst for regime change — fellow activists wanting radical left policies to change the country.
And change the country Albo will, if recent Labor practice is followed.
Take border protection.
Albo is a creature of Labor’s left faction and, as much as he has tried to memory hole his past, he always was an open borders guy.
We will have to take his word for it that he has seen the light, that he won’t do what Kevin Rudd did and bow to the pressure of the Green-left to dismantle Morrison’s hard-won border protections. It won’t be just a matter of maintaining the status quo. If Albanese wins the election, the boats will start again the day he is elected. The people smugglers know Labor is weak. They are probably readying their boats now.
After a drought during the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison years, they are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of the faux compassion chumps back in charge.
It is not compassionate to lure the most vulnerable into the arms of criminal people smugglers.
Albanese will need resolve to destroy the product these human traffickers sell to desperate souls seeking a better life.
But he does not appear to have either the resolve or an understanding of the successful policies Australia currently has in place, despite the fact he once was Rudd’s immigration minister.
It was only seven years ago, at the 2015 Labor Party national conference, that Albo joined fellow left-wing frontbenchers Tanya Plibersek and Penny Wong to oppose then-leader Bill Shorten’s boat turn-backs policy and urge a return to onshore processing.
Albanese said at the time he had “real concerns about the way that [the conference] was conducted in terms of the announcement on asylum seekers”.
He said boat turnbacks “is a red line we cannot cross’’.
“I think that it is absolutely critical, critical that we always remember our need for compassion and to not appeal to the darker side.” The moral vanity and hubris was thick with him.
In 2008, Albanese and other left faction MPs lobbied Rudd to get rid of offshore processing of asylum seekers.
In 2001, he was an out and proud devotee of “Labor For Refugees” – the lobby group advocating open borders. Former Labor leader Mark Latham once wrote scathingly about Albo and the “verbal slanging match” they had in late 2001 over illegal migration.
Albo argued that “in terms of fairness and compassion, the ALP should embrace open-door strategies”, wrote Latham.
Latham told him “he was deluding himself — that encouraging people smugglers could only end in disaster”.
Albo then accused Latham of “mimicking the racist views of my Western Sydney electorate”.
“Ultimately, Albanese had his way, as did Labor For Refugees.”
They sure did. Under the callous policies of the Rudd and Gillard Governments, more than 1200 asylum seekers drowned at sea. Some compassion.
All this history explains why Albanese bungled so badly last week when asked a question in Cessnock about his immigration policy. He should have been prepared for it. But he just doesn’t believe in our current border policies.
He suddenly declared offshore detention to be unnecessary, even though it is supposedly part of the Labor Party platform he is taking to the election and is a crucial plank of border protection.
“We’ll turn boats back,” Albo told reporters breezily. “Turning boats back means that you don’t need offshore detention”.
You’d think he would know better. After all, he was deputy to the second incarnation of Kevin Rudd who returned to the prime ministership and immediately reversed his disastrous dismantling of John Howard’s Pacific Solution to establish an offshore detention centre in Papua New Guinea.
Former Howard immigration minister Philip Ruddock, who successfully stopped the boats of the Keating era, and was demonised for his trouble, once explained it took an interlocking suite of measures to tackle the people smuggling trade and you can’t pick and choose which to use.
“There’s not any one measure which will bring people smuggling to an end,” he told me. “You just can’t pluck one measure and think it will do the job.’’ He saw people smugglers as entrepreneurs selling a product — permanent residency.
Temporary Protection Visas, which limited family reunions, lowered the value of that product.
Boat turnbacks were another key measure. Only seven boats were towed back to Indonesian waters under Ruddock, but disgruntled customers demanded their money back and new customers refused to pay smugglers in advance for their rickety boat trip.
Offshore processing centres were a crucial part of the mix ‘’to deal with expectations”, as was the excision of islands from the migration zone.
On Ruddock’s watch, the flow of boats fell from 43 in 2001 to an average three a year. By the time Rudd came to office there were just four people in detention centres who had arrived by boat. He quickly wrecked that happy situation. It was left to Tony Abbott, who won the 2013 election promising to “Stop The Boats”, to clean up the mess.
Operation Sovereign Borders was a triumph under his tough-minded and inventive Immigration Minister — our freshly derided Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
The drownings stopped, detention centres closed and the people smugglers got the message that their business model was kaput. Australia has been able to select a generous annual intake of genuinely needy refugees in a fair, orderly way ever since.
Back in Cessnock last week, Albo ended up grimly retracting his comments later in the day, answering a terse “yes” when asked if he would keep offshore processing.
But the damage was done.
Any voter who doesn’t want a repeat of Labor’s past immigration disasters is on notice.
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