Anthony Albanese politically outplayed over detention debacle

Andrew Giles and Clare O’Neil address the media on Wednesday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Peter Dutton has made a calculated decision to deny Anthony Albanese a get-out-of-jail card in the immigration detention debacle over which the government is presiding.

Dutton intends to make Labor pay for what is a serious political miscalculation over an issue that has the Albanese government now every bit as contorted as the Rudd/Gillard administrations before it.

Politics is now driving government decision making, with disastrous effect.

The two cabinet ministers with dual carriage of this issue, Clare O’Neil in Home Affairs and Andrew Giles in Immigration, now face legitimate questions about their competency.

This is reflecting directly on Albanese and the government more broadly.

It has made a gross error of judgment in believing that the opposition would be a willing participant in Labor’s attempts to paper over the cracks it has allowed to emerge in national security.

Those cracks now include allegations of bullying of the departmental secretary for simply doing her job.

Dutton hasn’t just served the Coalition’s political interests in siding with the Greens and the crossbench to demand more time to consider the government’s controversial deportation laws, he has served the interest of the parliament.

The speed and stealth with which the government attempted to rush through the bill is almost without precedent.

O’Neil has confused the role of the Senate by demanding it do its job and pass the government bill.

The job of the Senate is to scrutinise legislation, which is exactly what it is proposing to do.

O’Neil claims it is “bleedingly” obvious why the bill needed to be rushed through parliament. But it is still only obvious to her.

She has failed to articulate the urgency, or explain why the legislation could not have been introduced last week when it was clearly drafted.

It took probing during a press conference on Wednesday for O’Neil to finally concede that the “urgency” was partially linked to the ASF17 High Court case due to be heard on April 17.

“The ASF17 case does show that it is important that we have these powers,” Ms O’Neil said.

“It’s not the only reason why we’re doing this though. It is very important that the Australian government moves towards running a more orderly migration system.”

What the other reasons are remain unclear.

Dutton has called the government’s bluff on this, claiming he would be willing to return to parliament any time in the next six weeks to push through the deportation powers, if the government can present a convincing case on their urgency.

The net effect of this is clear. Albanese has been outplayed politically – which is rare – and his ambition of clearing the decks of political baggage before the May budget have been thwarted.