ALP’s bleeding hearts risk new tide of boats

Any signal to the people smugglers will invite a flotilla of human misery — and finish Labor.

After stumbling over the policy hazard of expanded domestic powers for the Australian Signals Directorate, novice Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton found a familiar handrail to steady himself last weekend with the news of a freighter carrying 131 Sri Lankan Tamil asylum-seekers, supposedly headed here, being intercepted in Malaysia.

A solemn-sounding Dutton used the opportunity to excoriate Labor for its asylum-seeker policies. Nonetheless, it is irrefutably the case that such boats are and will be a persistent threat. Dutton repeated the now familiar figure that there are 14,000 people in Indonesia ready to board boats headed to Australia.

That is just the number of UNHCR-registered asylum seekers in Indonesia who are eyeing off our mainland from the Javanese coast.

But it is a drop in the ocean of 65 million-plus displaced people around the world seeking haven from persecution, or simply a better life.

A potential human tsunami, held back under strain by the architecture of Operation Sovereign Borders, is something the opposition needs to think about seriously. If it manages to win the next election, its border protection policy will dictate whether or not it makes a cameo, one-term appearance in Australia’s contemporary political theatre.

Labor’s brains trust and party stalwarts will descend on Adelaide in July for the 48th ALP national conference to debate its national platform — effectively its federal election campaign strategy. The recently released draft policy paper, of course, deals with the contentious issue of border security.

It’s hard not to feel for Labor’s policy drafters. They must appease the party’s left, which will vehemently oppose any policy that sounds like the successful Tony Abbott-Scott Morrison mix of turning back the boats and offshore processing.

But they must also accommodate Bill Shorten’s concession to those policies. He knows that Operation Sovereign Borders cured the crisis that under Labor last time saw illegal arrivals at the rate of one leaky boat every six hours and led to so many deaths at sea, overflowing detention centres, fatigued maritime resources, and public concern about our insecure borders.

But Labor cannot afford to be vague on its border security policy. If it plans to maintain OSB — and I have been informed by a trusted Labor insider that it intends to do exactly that — then the party needs to be crystal clear on that point. Right now it looks wobbly and that’s exactly the vulnerability that people-smugglers are looking for in their relentless marketing of passages to Australia as they seek to relieve prospective asylum-seekers of $5000 to $10,000.

I have no doubt that in circulating its draft policy the Labor machine did not expect it to be displayed on the smartphones of people-smugglers as they loiter for customers in the Sarinah shopping mall near Jakarta’s UNHCR head office. I also have no doubt that is exactly what is happening right now. The marketing pitch? “Look, no mention of turnbacks. And here, a rule saying no one will spend more than 90 days in detention! Give me a deposit of $1000 and I’ll make sure you and your family have a secured berth on the first boat we send as soon as Australia goes to an election. Labor has been leading the polls for 60 consecutive polls now and is sure to win!”

It matters little that Labor’s spokesman on immigration and border protection, Shayne Neumann, has since clarified that its 90-day mandatory detention limit does not apply to offshore processing — this is what the Australian Border Force is trying to do with onshore detention — because the draft policy is being pitched to desperate people searching for a glimmer of hope. And they find not just a glimmer but the glow of false gold in the current draft policy and its language.

Labor’s actual border security policy — as I read it, and as several of the drafters have told me — is “business as usual”, except for a renewed effort to resettle people from Manus and Nauru into third countries. But the factional differences in the party on this issue are dangerous.

Without party solidarity underpinning a clear, unambiguous and explicit posture on Australia’s border settings, the sporadic launch of explorative boats from Indonesia and Malaysia under a newly elected Labor government will rapidly morph into a veritable flotilla of human desperation targeting our shores.

Roman Quaedvlieg is the former commissioner of the Australian Border Force.