Competence and trust.
The government knows it and the polling is beginning to express it.
The urgent rush on Tuesday to pass a new bill through the parliament to deal with the second-round effects of the NZYQ High Court case of last year has left the government looking panicked and blundering.
In a single act, it has elevated the argument dramatically that the executive is crippled by ineptitude over this issue, still spooked by the politics of the failed voice referendum and is now regularly engaged in acts of deception to mask its failures.
The irony is remarkable.
A centre-left Labor government seeking to introduce draconian immigration laws that it would never have agreed to in opposition had they been proposed by the Coalition.
If nothing else, it demonstrates just how conflicted the Albanese government has become on issues that present acute political risk externally on one hand with profound internal political and ideological consequences on the other.
The backing down on emissions standards and the olive branch to the Greens on religious freedom legislation – all on the same day – gives rise to a Prime Minister who appears to have pushed the panic button.
The genesis of this latest attempt to rush laws through parliament to deal with immigration detention lies with the High Court’s decision last year that found it illegal for the government to maintain an indefinite immigration detention regime where people had no real prospect of being deported.
This decision by the court was effectively made for it by Immigration Minister Andrew Giles’s failure to see what was coming and act to prevent it, when there was a clear opportunity to do so.
The result was the release of more than 150 detainees, many of them hardened convicted criminals.
A new High Court case will now be heard on whether the government can be forced to release detainees who refuse to co-operate with the Department of Home Affairs seeking their legal deportation.
Giles has had plenty of time to prepare for this new case, which will be heard on April 17.
Yet he decided to wait until 8am on Tuesday morning to drop out its new bill with the demand that it be passed by the House of Representatives before question time.
This new bill, which Giles claimed was “urgent”, effectively seeks to create a new class of criminal of those detainees who refused to co-operate.
Legal experts believe the government is unlikely to lose the new case – known as ASF17. So the urgency argument is debatable.
What is not beyond debate is that Albanese has sought to engage in an egregious exploitation of parliament to pass a bill without effective scrutiny, in an attempt to get the issue off the books before Easter and clear the air ahead of the May budget.
All these issues serve as distractions from the primary political issue – the cost of living.
If Albanese learned anything about the failed voice referendum, it was this.
The longer the government remains captive to issues that go directly to competency, the more it will become defined by them and an absence of response to the economic imperative.
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The rolling disaster that the Albanese government has now made of immigration detention risks becoming emblematic of two broader and deeper problems for Labor.