Don’t forget, Labor left us with Manus mess
REMEMBER the dark days when Labor made a hash of border protection and gave a free kick to the people smugglers, asks Miranda Devine. It can all happen again.
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KEVIN Rudd has the most unbelievable hide.
There he was, virtue signalling again on Twitter yesterday, berating Malcolm Turnbull for his “inhumane” handling of asylum seekers on Manus Island.
Rudd knows full well that there wouldn’t be a Manus Island detention centre if he hadn’t gone and dismantled border protection when he was PM.
His vanity opened the floodgates to at least 50,000 undocumented asylum seekers on boats and led directly to the drowning of 1200 souls. It also prevented Australia resettling real refugees in genuine need as economic refugees jumped the queue.
Turnbull's handling of Manus is inhumane. The 2013 Agreement was for a year. Turnbull has failed to resettle them, so they should come to Oz
— Kevin Rudd (@MrKRudd) November 7, 2017
Rudd’s tweet is a timely reminder, as the constitutional citizenship circus and a constellation of demented Turnbull-haters test the stability of the government, that you should be careful what you wish for.
Disenchanted Liberal voters say one little term of Labor would be worth the price to rid their party of Turnbull and all his works.
What could go wrong?
Two words: Oceanic Viking.
Remember the Customs vessel in 2009 that rescued 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers who had scuttled their boat in Indonesian waters, and took them back to Indonesia, as it was legally entitled to do?
They refused to get off the boat but insisted on being ferried to Australia. A month-long standoff ensued, with refugee activists hammering the government until Rudd wimped out by rewarding the recalcitrant Tamils with the offer of quick resettlement to Australia.
In that one action Rudd destroyed the Howard government’s hard-won border protection and signalled to the world that Australia was again a soft touch. The people smugglers were back in business, with tragic consequences.
Rudd also abandoned temporary protection visas, offshore processing, and mandatory detention.
Never has Labor apologised or acknowledged wrongdoing.
Nor have the Greens, GetUp!, Julian Burnside and assorted other compassionistas who egged Rudd on.
Greens leader Adam Bandt showed last week he has learned no lessons from Rudd’s border fiasco, when he attacked Immigration Minister Peter Dutton as a “terrorist”: “To look at the face of Peter Dutton is to look into the cold eyes of someone who is prepared to kill someone for political gain.”
The lack of insight into the Green’s own fatal politicking is breathtaking.
But when Rudd2.0 took back the prime ministership, there did come a tacit admission of guilt, and that was his ruthless Manus Island solution, designed to make Labor look even tougher than the Coalition on border protection.
The voters didn’t buy it, of course, and it took a mammoth effort of will and skill for the Abbott government to stop the boats for a second time.
Now Dutton has managed to process most of Rudd’s backlog of asylum seekers, and no children are left in detention anywhere.
Manus was emptying out, even as the detention centre was ordered closed by PNG’s Supreme Court. The government has built alternative new accommodation for the remaining 587 men, who refuse to go there. We’re left with a few bolshie Iranians staging a fake humanitarian crisis for the ABC, orchestrated by GetUp! and the Greens, who are endorsing racist badmouthing of Manus locals. They have also been embarrassed by Facebook selfies of their posterboys having a whale of a time soaking up the sun and sipping from coconuts on a tropical beach.
A “lovely two days holidays with my lovely, cute, beautiful and best ever friends,” wrote one.
And, lo and behold, we see Labor buckling again.
Under pressure from his left flank, Bill Shorten is trying to look compassionate, while making out he’s strong on borders.
Shorten last week waded into the Manus quagmire and urged the PM to consider New Zealand’s offer to resettle 150 of the men, when everyone knows that New Zealand is just a back door to Australia. The people smugglers would sell any New Zealand deal to prospective customers as weakness and a signal to resume their trade to Australia. Shorten even went so far as to endorse the UN’s description of the Manus protesters’ self-imposed discomfort as a “humanitarian emergency”.
“We don’t want to see the people smugglers back in business, but I think there is something going on at Manus which is deeply disturbing to the Australian people,” Shorten said.
It’s vanity, hubris and recklessness that allows a cigarette paper to slip between Labor and the Coalition on border protection. Yet that is what cocky Shorten has done.
We all know how easy it is for the people smuggling business to restart. And we know the dire consequences for Australia. Now we see that even in opposition Labor can’t maintain the charade that it’s serious about border protection.
So why, you have to ask, when the stakes are so high, are people who call themselves conservatives so enthusiastically willing Bill Shorten into government?