Anthony Albanese would appear to have secured a much-needed victory from Wednesday’s national cabinet meeting.
At least that’s how it is being sold.
Under pressure across a range of fronts, including an economy about to hit the wall, the Prime Minister desperately needed to project an image of national leadership.
His ability to shut down the bluster of state and territory leaders over the GST, NDIS and health funding offered him a timely occasion to achieve this. If only temporarily.
The question is at what cost.
The states won the argument on GST funding and got an effective $1.2bn for their mismanaged emergency departments.
The finer details of the NDIS reforms, however, appear to have been kicked into the long grass, while the net effect of the pledges by the states to contribute more will amount in the end to a rounding error of about 1 per cent, according to the opposition.
Given Albaneses’s weakened political position more broadly, it was probably as good a deal as the federal government could expect to get.
There is no question that Albanese and senior members of his cabinet have been perilously outplayed politically and tactically for the past three weeks over the government’s response to the High Court’s immigration detainee disaster.
The Coalition has shown that it is capable of seizing opportunity and making Labor pay for mistakes.
The political pressure it has been able to apply to the senior cabinet ranks of the government has been potent. And it is showing.
Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus’s maddened response to questions from a female journalist on Wednesday was revealing.
A rhetorical and ideological partition within the senior ranks of the government over immigration, the rule of law and a desire to maintain a posture of looking tough on criminals, is becoming apparent.
The opposition knows this. And another political wedge is coming. The government passed its citizenship bill through the Senate on Wednesday just before question time, tidying up another High Court decision earlier this year – which goes to the stripping of Australian citizenships for dual citizen terrorist offenders.
But it is not the end of the politics by any means.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil again on Wednesday refused to apologise to Peter Dutton for calling him a protector of pedophiles last week because of the Coalition’s politicking over yet another piece of legislation required to keep released criminal detainees away from schools, among other things.
The opposition has now demanded five amendments be made to the citizenship bill which would expand its scope from terrorists to child sex offenders.
O’Neil late on Wednesday wrote back to opposition immigration spokesman Dan Tehan to say that the government had no intention of revisiting the bill to include child sex offenders.
Its not hard to see where the Coalition is going. O’Neil exposed the government to inevitable reprisals after inviting the moral contest to begin with. Now Dutton intends to reverse the blowtorch.
When both sides are muddied, it is the government that most often loses most.
But Dutton believes a central political question remains at the heart of Labor’s dilemma and the government’s need to maintain public confidence on an issue that has been politically disastrous for it in the past.
Key to the interrogation is a question the government is refusing to answer. Did Immigration Minister Andrew Giles sign off on May 30 to the agreed statement of facts to the High Court in regard to the case NZYQ, which conceded the key point in the case – that the detainee had no real prospect of being deported?
And if so, why, when it became apparent that this was a mistake as underlined by O’Neil’s attempts to remedy this in August by desperately seeking a third country to deport him to.
While the new preventive detention regime to deal with this mess will have passed parliament by Wednesday night, this is by no means the end of what will be a longer-running political problem for Albanese.
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