Anthony Albanese says the Labor Party supports a secure border policy with “humanity’’. He has defended the appointment of Kristina Keneally as opposition home affairs spokeswoman despite her history of criticising the pillars of border security policy.
Speaking to the ABC, Keneally said she now supported offshore processing and boat turnbacks “where safe to do so”. Like Albanese, she uses obscure qualifications without defining them. For example, she claims Labor is interested in “keeping people safe but also not losing our collective national soul, not losing our collective national conscience”.
There are obvious problems with Labor’s home affairs chief putting national security in the same category as “collective national soul”. The most obvious is that transcendental musings are not renowned for their power to stop terrorists, traffickers and people-smugglers at the border. But Labor has doubled down on soul-signalling over national security by begging the authority of Rome. Albanese attributed Keneally’s past criticism of secure border policy to her religion, saying it was a reflection of her Catholic faith.
It is increasingly common for the green-left to claim Christ-like virtue for policies that fail the test of reason. Sometimes they cite biblical passages out of context to bolster the case for weak Western borders.
Catholics are increasingly susceptible to the habit of categorical error under the guidance of Pope Francis. As this newspaper’s Tess Livingstone wrote in 2017: “In a line that would delight the Greens, (Pope Francis) urged Catholics to lobby governments to adopt open-border policies.” He is yet to demonstrate how open borders would create durable peace and freedom for humanity.
In his book The Virtue of Nationalism, political theorist Yoram Hazony makes a case for the nation as a material good with religious origins. He argues the principle of self-determination is inseparable from the nation-state and considers the origin of the idea in the Hebrew bible.
It is here, Hazony argues, that the virtue of nationalism is explained. The order of the political world is secured by nations cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without undue interference.
When last in office, Labor dismantled the Howard government’s protection of national borders. Its virtue-signalling sent a green light to people-smugglers. The result of the ALP’s exercise in collective national conscience and humanity was the arrival of 50,000 asylum-seekers on 848 boats and an estimated 1160 deaths at sea. The ALP left a $16 billion bill for Australian taxpayers to clean up its mess.
If the Labor experiment with porous borders was a historical anomaly, the party might be in a position to advise the Coalition on national security. But from the opposition benches, Labor ensured the passage of legislation that compromised Australian borders. It rejected citizenship reform aimed at prioritising the national interest through strengthened vetting procedures.
Labor worked with the green-left to dismantle the pillars of Australian border security. It used children as political weapons to justify support for the medevac bill that effectively transferred authority over who can enter the country from the government elected by the people to unelected medics.
Labor MPs used the plight of children to make their case for the medevac bill despite its border policy having resulted in 8000 children being held in detention.
Labor’s record of governing against the national interest goes well beyond border security. When last in office, it prepared laws to gag freedom of speech and the free press.
It was amusing to watch Albanese cry freedom this week given his central role in agitating for a media meta-regulator under the Gillard government. The 2012 Finkelstein inquiry, stacked with left-wing advisers, came up with the stunning idea to regulate the free press.
It called for the establishment of a taxpayer-funded, super statutory regulator covering print, radio, television and online media. The new censor would be empowered to impose a range of sanctions on journalists as well as media companies. While former Labor heavyweights urged caution, Albanese stood out as one of the few members of caucus gunning for media meta-regulation.
The Coalition prevented Labor and the Greens from establishing an Orwellian regulator to punish dissent from the green-left line, but it has been unable to prevent the ALP from supporting media censorship under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. When Bill Leak was mobbed by the PC class in the months before his death, Labor defended the law that empowered his persecution.
Opposition legal affairs spokesman Mark Dreyfus wanted to extend its reach. In May this year, he said: “We are certainly going to be defending section 18C and I would propose to beef up the activities of the Human Rights Commission.”
Last Thursday, Dreyfus wrote a passionate defence of the free press in light of police raids on ABC offices and the home of News Corp national politics editor Annika Smethurst. In The Guardian, he criticised the Coalition government’s response to the raids, suggesting Labor was an admirable advocate for press freedom.
On Saturday, the Fairfax press revealed it had obtained correspondence showing that Dreyfus wrote to former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull urging him to “convene an investigation into how secret government documents were leaked” to Smethurst.
Perhaps Albanese was hoping for a miracle when he rewrote Keneally’s history of prosecuting porous borders as a Christian virtue. Maybe he thought we’d forget how much damage the green-left does to freedom of speech when given the power to govern. But Labor’s moral posturing on border security and press freedom is just a little bit of hypocrisy repeating.
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No one wants to be lectured on humanity by politicians, let alone backers of porous borders whose compassion resulted in more than 1000 deaths at sea. No one wants to hear about press freedom from the party whose leader sought to muzzle the media with a meta-regulator. Within weeks of losing an unlosable election, Labor is positioning itself as the moral authority on freedom despite a long record of undermining the foundations of liberal democracy.