The great boat scare gathers steam amid a sea of ironies

Coalition’s cynical ploy hits Labor with a taste of its own medicine.

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Although I find the Coalition’s campaign tactics to unpick Labor on border protection more than a little sickening, it is hard to feel sorry for the opposition. What goes around comes around.

Labor’s Mediscare campaign at the last election was perhaps the most blatant distortion I have seen in modern Australian politics, and it profoundly influenced the following term of government. History may be about to repeat itself.

Malcolm Turnbull looked set to win a small but comfortable majority before Bill Shorten frightened voters with a disingenuous campaign claiming that the Coalition planned to “privatise Medicare”. The argument was so laughable that at first government strategists considered it barely worth a response.

Medicare is hardly a profit-making enterprise. To privatise it you’d need to find a buyer, and that is only the first absurdity. Throw in that the Coalition never suggested such a thing and Turnbull explicitly ruled it out, and the notion was a complete joke.

But not for voters worried about their healthcare, especially in the wake of previous attempts by the Coalition to impose policy changes such as a Medicare co-payment.

Fast forward to today and it’s now the Coalition running an overblown scare campaign, this time on boats. It is unlikely to sink Shorten’s bid to become PM, but could certainly restrict the size of his victory. Turnbull barely scraped across the line in the wake of the Mediscare campaign; were Shorten to win only narrowly, it would weaken his mandate and lower his standing with colleagues. In short, it would change the manner in which a new Labor government might conduct itself.

Labor’s support for amendments giving doctors the power to refer sick asylum-seekers to the mainland for treatment has its problems. But the concerns are fairly nuanced, in contrast to Scott Morrison’s blunt-force attack.

The Prime Minister claims rapists, child molesters and murders will be let in under Labor’s policy. Never mind that the amendments made in the house impose a character test to prevent such an outcome. The PM argues that he needs to open the Christmas Island detention centre, in part to accommodate expected new arrivals because of the Labor law. Yet the security briefings that have been made public do not support that claim. The PM has said any two doctors can now decide who comes here, which is false.

The new law grants the powers, with checks, to a panel of doctors chosen by the Australian Border Force’s chief medical officer. Coalition MPs, to be inflammatory, say the two doctors could even be Greens leader Richard Di Natale and his predecessor Bob Brown, ignoring the fact that Di Natale is no longer registered to practise.

But facts don’t matter in modern politics, which is a bipartisan problem. The government between now and the election will spruik the idea that the boats will start flowing once again because of the new legislation. Even if that were to happen, it would be impossible to clarify cause and effect. Surely a prime minister and his home affairs minister repeatedly claiming that new laws will have the effect of enlivening the people- smugglers trade in and of itself has the effect of doing exactly that?

The government’s rhetoric is a self-fulfilling prophecy — cynically, perhaps even designed to urge the boats to start up again. Because if they did, it would be political manna from heaven for a government that has been staring down the barrel of an electoral wipeout. But as I say, it’s hard to feel sorry for Labor, given its form in mounting disingenuous scare campaigns.

And let’s not forget a couple of important ironies in the way events unfolded this week. Yes, Labor and the crossbench managed to enact laws against the government’s wishes. And yes, Peter Dutton as the responsible minister was furious, using parliament and taking to the airwaves to condemn them for doing so. But the only reason Labor and the crossbenchers have the numbers to do what they did is because Dutton challenged Turnbull, with the flow-on effects of Turnbull resigning from parliament, the Liberals losing the Wentworth by-election, and one-time Turnbull ally Julia Banks defecting to the crossbench, from where she supported the bill that originated as the idea of the new independent member for Wentworth, Kerryn Phelps.

Further, community concern about poor medical treatment on Nauru and in particular Manus Island largely stems from the mental health issues those held there are suffering from because of years of internment. The government should have found a solution to the situation long before now. Yes, it inherited the problem from Labor, but five years on surely its time for a no longer new government to take responsibility. John Howard never left asylum-seekers (75 per cent of whom were assessed to be genuine refugees) to languish for so many years in ­detention. Howard quietly emptied the centres away from the public glare. This government left them there so long that health problems developed and there was no chance of quietly solving the problem. A problem at least in part, therefore, of its own making.

While I don’t feel sorry for Labor as the government exploits the politics of a scare campaign over boats, I certainly do feel sorry for those caught up in the saga who are genuine refugees who simply sought a better life away from tyranny. Something any of us would seek to do for ourselves and our loved ones.

But there are undeniable problems with the laws Labor supported this week, including after the amendments put through the house. Government policy should always reside in the hands of government (and by extension parliament). But these laws place power largely in the hands of a panel of doctors. The minister can reject its advice only in certain circumstances. With the exception of court rulings as part of the checks and balances in a democracy, the minister and the government and parliament by extension should be the ultimate decision-makers, even on medical matters. They should just be more diligent than this government has been in heeding that professional advice.

But even if a minister is to lose that power, the amendment Labor negotiated to apply the new law only to existing asylum-seekers, and not to any new arrivals, creates a two-tiered system, and with it second-class asylum-seekers. New arrivals won’t get proper medical treatment, if they need it, via transfer to the mainland, but existing detainees will? That is a deeply inconsistent outcome put in place simply as a political fix so Labor could mitigate the political fallout of supporting the bill.

Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.