Border protection policies must be watertight, clear

For almost 20 years, any day on which asylum-seeker policy has come to the fore in federal politics has been a bad day for Labor. Anthony Albanese was risking potential disaster when he stumbled over the issue of boat turnbacks in his debate with Scott Morrison on Wednesday. John Howard’s win in the 2001 Tampa election and Tony Abbott’s win in 2013 showed Australians expect governments to maintain border security. After 50,000 asylum-seeker arrivals on more than 800 boats, with 1200 known drownings at sea on Labor’s watch from 2007 to 2013, voters understand the people smugglers’ deadly business model. They also know that given any chance the smugglers will resume their deadly trade.

Like many in his party, the Opposition Leader has been a chameleon on the issue. In 2015, he was against leader Bill Shorten’s pragmatic push for the party to support boat turnbacks. “If people were in a boat including families and children, I myself couldn’t turn that around,” Mr Albanese said at the time. He now insists he has changed his mind because turnbacks worked. But turnbacks were just one of several planks of Operation Sovereign Borders. That policy was overseen by the Prime Minister when he was immigration and border protection minister under Mr Abbott from 2013 to 2014.

Offshore processing (which Mr Albanese also supports, although he stumbled over the issue last week) and temporary protection visas also were cornerstones of stopping the boats. But Mr Albanese and the opposition do not support TPVs, despite the fact they have helped cut hundreds of boat arrivals.

When Labor scrapped TPVs in 2008, asylum-seeker arrivals rose from seven to about 300 a year, Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews said on Thursday. When Mr Abbott reintroduced TPVs after the 2013 election, boat arrivals fell from 300 to one within a year, she said. The Coalition’s success allowed most detention centres to be closed and the refugee intake through official channels to be increased. Opposition home affairs spokeswoman Kristina Keneally insists Labor “completely supports Operation Sovereign Borders, offshore processing, regional resettlement and boat turnbacks where it is safe to do so”. But recent history supports Ms Andrews’s argument that “if you get rid of temporary protection visas, you give a green light to the people smugglers starting up again”.

Mr Albanese has changed his mind several times over asylum-seeker policy. Before the 2013 election, when the issue was Labor’s biggest policy weakness, he backed the party’s so-called Malaysian solution but admitted he would never have done so a decade earlier. Mr Albanese was flat-footed when Mr Morrison drew him out about his attitude to turnbacks when he was deputy prime minister to Kevin Rudd in 2013.

“So you were going to do turnbacks?” Mr Morrison asked.

“No, no, that’s right,” Mr Albanese conceded.

Some Labor members and supporters remain openly ambivalent about asylum-seeker policy. Earlier in the week, the Labor for Refugees lobby group claimed an incoming Labor government needed to get to the thousands of refugees before they boarded boats. The refugees needed to be pointed to the correct pathways to enter Australia, the group said. If the party was elected, “you can bet” the boats would start again, it said. A post on its Facebook page said: “There are over 15,000 people in Indonesia waiting to get to Australia.”

After years with no illegal boat arrivals, much of the heat has gone out of the issue. But the public remembers the tragic 2008-13 armada. They would not tolerate a repeat due to a weakening of effective policy.