Finally, Morrison has a chance to earn his crown
Labor is so cocky they watered down border protection before the election, playing straight into the PM’s hands. Now his colleagues like Pyne need to wake up to themselves, writes Miranda Devine.
If the government loses the May election it won’t be because Prime Minister Scott Morrison lacks political nous.
Forget Aslan. In the last parliamentary session before the likely May election, Morrison has managed, virtually single-handedly, to flip the tables on a smug Opposition which had been coasting to victory without raising a sweat.
In fact, so cocky has Opposition leader Bill Shorten and Labor’s parliamentary team become that they can’t be bothered even waiting a few weeks till after the election to start watering down border protection.
Big mistake. The memory of Kevin 07 burns bright in the memories of Australian voters. With Kevin Rudd’s pretence that he would be as tough on people smuggling as John Howard, he caved into refugee activists at the first confrontation, thus consigning 1200 asylum seekers to a watery grave over the rest of Labor’s reign, as the floodgates opened to 50,000 boat arrivals. Who could forget those images of people drowning before our eyes as an asylum seeker boat crashed into rocks off Christmas Island.
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“We implore the House not to break what is unbroken,” Morrison thundered in Parliament today before the government lost a historic vote on changes to border protection.
“Imagine what [Labor] would do in government. They are failing the test of mettle, of duty to the Australian people …
“I remind them their ‘humanitarianism’ last time led to child deaths, the total destruction of our borders … The people of Australia will remember this day and know it is on your head.”
Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Morrison, the immigration minister who stopped the boats as the greatest achievement of the Abbott government, is best placed to stop the electorate being fooled once more. He achieved a feat that no one thought possible, securing our borders, closing the detention centres, and freeing all the children who had been locked up by Labor’s egomaniacal virtue signalling.
The accidental PM who inherited a divided party and a looming election rout is suddenly ascendant. A glimmer of hope emerges.
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Suddenly, the political debate is playing to the government’s strengths, all thanks to the well-meaning naïvete of Dr Kerryn Phelps and the palpable hubris of Bill Shorten.
Phelps’ by-election victory in the seat of Wentworth last year after the bungled coup against Malcolm Turnbull sent the former PM on a vengeful exit from politics was written up at the time as a catastrophe for the already shaky Morrison government. But it may well turn out to have been a blessing in disguise.
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Phelps’ so-called Medivac bill would outsource Australia’s border control to unelected doctors. Regardless of the fine print, regardless of any amendments, Labor’s support for the bill already 22 times in the Senate late last year and its subsequent vacillating this week has sent the signal to people smugglers that if Shorten becomes Prime Minister, as he expects to do in May, they’re back in business.
It has given them a story to sell to anyone looking to buy a ticket to a better life. It has already put the sugar back on the table, as the Indonesians described Australia’s previous self-inflicted pull factors.
It’s been messy, with the government today losing the first vote on the floor of the House of Representatives since 1929.
But the price was worth it to show Labor’s true colours. It demonstrates that even before an election, even after the horrible human toll of the Rudd-Gillard years, Labor wants to dismantle Australia’s border protection yet again. They’ve signed up to an election on national security, a front they can’t possibly win, especially against the guy who has a model of a boat in his office as the symbol of his greatest electoral asset.
Now it’s up to Morrison’s colleagues to shake themselves out of their despondency and fatalism and rally behind him.
The self-indulgent lack of discipline showed by Defence Minister Christopher Pyne and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton in recent weeks is a shameful betrayal of the country. Pyne really took the cake, when he lamented the loss of Turnbull in a story which landed on Monday, the very day Morrison was hoping to reset the government’s fortunes in a set-piece speech at the National Press Club.
Pyne ridiculously likened the departed PM to Aslan, the Christ-like figure in CS Lewis’s iconic Narnia children’s series, foreshadowing a long winter ahead for the Coalition and revealing he wept through the whole flight back to Adelaide after the coup.
The King is dead. Long live the King. And Morrison may just get to earn his crown, if his sulking slacker colleagues wake up to themselves.
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