Peta Credlin: Anthony Albanese has always been weak on border protection
Labor leader Anthony Albanese has never had a strong stance on border policy, and his current small target strategy just looks like he’s trying to hide something, Peta Credlin writes.
Opinion
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Anthony Albanese’s economic brain fade last Monday might have got all the attention, but it was Thursday’s border protection comments that were much more of a disqualification for office.
Let’s face it, the government influences the economy but doesn’t run it. Border protection, though, is wholly in government hands and if the government isn’t up to it – like Labor last time they were in power – the boats start coming, people start dying and Australia’s sovereignty is debased.
Albanese has always been weak on border protection. In the Howard days, first, he was against mandatory detention, even though it was the Keating government that introduced it. Then, he was against temporary protection visas (TPVs), which the Rudd government abolished.
Finally, he was against offshore processing, which even the Rudd government eventually restored, just before the 2013 election. On boat turn-backs, even after they’d been shown to work, he was still against them saying in 2015 that he couldn’t support what he wouldn’t be prepared to do himself.
As late as 2018, he still couldn’t bring himself to say that he supported turn-backs, claiming instead that he supported the party platform, even though he’d argued against it and tried to vote it down.
Last Thursday’s verbal gymnastics, when he first supported turn-backs but not offshore detention, before subsequently claiming to support both, was so damaging because he’s always been in Labor’s bleeding-heart wing and has routinely said that you can’t have a strong border security if it’s also weak on humanity (as if there’s anything humane about people drowning at sea, or anything humane about people smugglers).
Under Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, “compassion” meant scrapping the Howard government’s border protection policies – putting the “sugar” back on the table for the people smugglers – and the result was more than 1000 illegal boats coming to Australia and at least a thousand deaths at sea.
When Tony Abbott kept saying that there’s nothing compassionate about policies that lead to people drowning at sea, Albanese was among the first to disagree.
On top of the Howard government policies (offshore processing, TPVs, and turn-backs) that had stopped the first wave of boats, to stop a much bigger wave, the Abbott government needed to introduce a unified command structure through Operation Sovereign Borders, a news blackout on people smuggling operations and most importantly big orange lifeboats to safely send illegal arrivals back to Indonesia.
The lifeboats were instrumental in the success of Operation Sovereign Borders because people smugglers had started to scuttle the original boats close to Australia’s waters, forcing our navy to (rightly) save lives, but at the same time, do the smuggler’s bidding by delivering their clients to Australia’s jurisdiction.
Sending people back in lifeboats ended the scuttling game, the deaths at sea and, eventually, the people smuggling trade – for the moment.
When it is all said and done, stopping the boats came down to resolve and PM Abbott was determined. Every time there was an obstacle thrown up, or a bureaucrat (or colleague) who got wobbly, he stiffened their spine and made it clear the boats would be turned around and he was not for turning.
Eventually, those inside the Canberra system who just hoped they could wear him down realised the Coalition meant business.
After last week, no one can credibly claim that a prime minister Albanese would have the inclination, the fortitude or the consistency to keep these policies. Especially if he’s reliant on the Greens for support in the parliament as he almost certainly would be.
Labor’s current border protection shadow minister Kristina Keneally has been as weak and inconsistent as her leader, particularly on the issue of TPVs.
In any event, just as Labor can’t say who will be the defence minister if they win, Albanese isn’t able to confirm Keneally in home affairs; although some like me see that as a blessing.
It’s crystal-clear that in order to maintain a border protection regime that the rest of the world (sometimes secretly) admires, and, in Britain’s case, is starting to copy, you need all three major policy elements – turning boats around, TPVs and offshore processing. Yet Labor can’t help pandering to people who think everyone who wants to come to Australia has a right to do so.
As recently as July 2018, grilled over his position on turn-backs, Albanese first said that he now supported the party platform, and after then admitting that he’d voted against turn-backs, asked what he’d do next time it came up, he merely said: “I’m not dealing in hypotheticals.”
As a frontbencher in 2004, it was Albanese who asked Labor’s left caucus to endorse releasing all boat people from detention, abolishing TPVs, and allowing boat people on Christmas Island full access to Australia’s legal system.
On border protection policy, as on economic policy, the Opposition Leader now wants Australians to think that he’s changed and that Labor has changed. Unfortunately for him, every time he looks confused or ignorant, he ends up reinforcing suspicions that Labor hasn’t really changed at all.
Look down the Labor frontbench – apart from the shadow treasurer — it’s all the old faces recycled from the Rudd-Gillard years, including Chris Bowen, Tony Burke and Brendan O’Connor, the three immigration ministers who presided over what some consider the greatest border protection disaster in our history. It’s the same old Labor and while the makeover might have changed the look, it’s the same old leftie Albo.
Albanese’s small-target strategy now just looks like he’s trying to hide something. And he all but admitted that when he said on Thursday “we’re not promising everything that we’d like to do”.
In other words, what we say we’ll do, isn’t really what we’d want to do, if we could; or what we will do, if we can.
Watch Peta Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm
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