Federal election 2016: Who won Day 11 of the campaign?

On a day of cheap politics over migrants, it is tempting to say there were no winners. But that would be dishonest.

There was no delicacy or empathy in the way Peter Dutton dismissed refugees as illiterate and innumerate on Tuesday night.

Yet there was no doubt it worked on Wednesday morning.

The outrage against the Immigration Minister put border protection at the top of the election agenda for yet another day, turning the campaign to Malcolm Turnbull’s advantage.

Bill Shorten attacked the “pathetic scare campaign” but he was on dangerous ground. He wanted to promote his transport funding for Sydney but found himself talking about asylum seekers instead.

LIVE: Federal Election Campaign, Day 11

The Opposition Leader chose to call out Dutton for “debasing” the election campaign with a smear against all migrants, although the minister was clearly talking about refugees.

Part of Dutton’s argument was ludicrous: that many refugees could not read, could not write, would “languish” in unemployment and yet would also put Australians out of work. “These people would be taking Australian jobs, there’s no question about that,” he said – replicating one of the most odious and discredited claims from the White Australia policy.

“That was an indiscriminate spray,” Labor’s immigration spokesman Richard Marles said on Wednesday night, when the fury over the issue was still running. “It was political dog whistling at its worst and it ought to be called out.”

The furious response

The trouble for Labor was that Dutton had a message that resonates with plenty of Australians.

Dutton only made his remark when he was asked about the Greens’ policy of increasing the humanitarian intake to 50,000 places a year – a huge increase on current government policy to lift the annual intake from 13,750 to 18,750 over four years. Labor’s target is 27,000 by 2025.

When the question moved on to the challenge of settling refugees who had gone through years of conflict in Afghanistan, Dutton made his point.

“For many people, they won’t be numerate or literate in their own language, let alone English, and this is a difficulty because the Greens are very close to the CFMEU, as obviously the Labor Party is, and their affiliations with the union movement obviously are well known,” he said.

It was a clumsy attempt to score a political point against the Greens, Labor and the unions all at once.

Even so, the furious response to Dutton became a dishonest debate. Because Dutton was dog whistling, he had to be proven wrong. Because he had to be proven wrong, migrants had to be declared champions (like Frank Lowy and Victor Chang) and awkward facts had to be ignored. It became too easy to overlook the real difficulty of settling migrants – especially 50,000 of them a year.

Out of touch

A survey of thousands of relatively new migrants, including 8,500 taken under the humanitarian program, shows just how difficult settlement is. The study was done by Australian Survey Research for the federal government in 2010 and its results released the following year. It is called “Settlement outcomes of new arrivals” and can be found here.

When the migrants were asked how well they spoke English, about half said “well” or “very well” while the other half said “not well” or “not at all”. Nothing shocking about that. Asked about work, 24.1 per cent said they worked for a wage or salary while others said they studied or looked after their families. Another 11.3 per cent said they were unemployed and looking for work, while 3.3 per cent said they were unemployed and not looking for work.

The results varied hugely according to where migrants came from. “Afghanis and Iraqis are least likely to be employed and also part of households which are most likely to receive Centrelink payments,” it said, adding that 94 per cent of Afghan households were in receipt of Centrelink payments.

This is the reality. Yet the Greens claim that their policy of taking 50,000 humanitarian migrants every year would save $160 million. That policy is here.

Given that the budget shows it will cost $827.4 million cost over four years to settle 12,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees, the Greens’ claim is obvious nonsense.

The government’s message is certain to hit a chord with voters if recent surveys are any guide. The Scanlon Foundation’s Mapping Social Cohesion survey showed last year that 35 per cent of Australians thought the migrant intake was too high, 41 per cent thought it was “about right” and 19 per cent thought it too low. The Scanlon survey has been done almost every year since 2007 and the responses on this question hardly vary. The latest survey is here.

While Dutton sounded heartless, Turnbull tried to sound full of mercy. He had to back his minister but did so with a softer message – and he skipped the tawdry claim that migrants were taking Australian jobs.

“They are from dreadful, devastated, war-torn regions of the world and many of them, large percentages of them have no English skills at all. Many of them are illiterate in their own language. Many of them have not completed high school. That is no fault of theirs. That is why we are reaching out to help them with compassion,” Turnbull said.

Who won the day

On a day of cheap politics over migrants, it is tempting to say there were no winners. But that would be dishonest.

Shorten had all the moral outrage on his side, but that is not enough to win over voters.

Turnbull had a stronger and more compelling message and showed no sign that he was uncomfortable tackling the issue. He was also more honest with voters because he acknowledged what others wanted to deny – the sheer difficulty of settling refugees.

Is that so hard to admit?