Anthony Albanese is now paying a price for putting the wrong minister in charge of immigration

Immigration Minister Andrew Giles. Picture: Martin Ollman / NewsWire

Anthony Albanese is paying a political price for the natural insecurity of leadership while his frontbench is being handed a lesson in hubris.

The immigration detention disaster of last year now threatens to derail the momentum Labor has been building since January around tax cuts.

The political poignancy of this issue is that it is one that can’t be just wished away.

It is a serious challenge that the government not only failed to see coming but has since failed to address adequately.

And it will continue to bubble away as a permanent feature of the Coalition’s campaign to undermine Labor’s credentials on national security.

Based on the performance of the ministers responsible, the Coalition has been gifted an opportunity that never should have been available had reasonable competence been applied to begin with.

While both sides of politics have issues and weaknesses in their frontbench, it is a more profound problem for the government. This was a problem for Albanese during the voice referendum campaign. It is now becoming a problem on immigration and community safety.

Andrew Giles, as a member of the Prime Minister’s left-wing coterie, is a key numbers man whom Albanese relies on for continued factional stability.

Giles’s reward for this clout was a cabinet posting.

But Giles is also deeply ideological.

Immigration requires a hard edge and an attention to detail that will often require decisions that may upset the Labor base.

Albanese couldn’t have picked a worse portfolio than immigration for Giles considering the combination of his bondage to Labor’s internal constituency on the left and his own ideological position.

Unsurprisingly, Albanese’s decision to put Giles in this portfolio has now come back to bite him.

Giles’s performance so far this week in parliament has been beyond deficient, with one of the Liberal Party’s best frontbenchers, Dan Tehan, running the tactical campaign against him.

Giles has been exposed as being absent for at least three meetings with senior legal counsel from the department prior to the High Court decision. The Coalition has implied he was attending voice events on those days.

There can be no certainty that had Giles attended the meetings, the outcome would have been different. But it goes to the minister’s lack of attention to a serious political and legal issue with wide-reaching consequences, which are now playing out as expected.

This is a portfolio laden with political risk and one in which Labor has a long and unmeritorious history.

Giles’s feebleness and the department’s apparent incompetence has allowed Liberal leader Peter Dutton to steer the parliamentary debate away from Albanese’s tax cuts and back into territory it believes favours Coalition strengths.

It demonstrates, if nothing else, how fleeting political success can be and how ill-prepared the government was for this issue to be prosecuted again despite warnings rarely being clearer.