Federal election 2016: David Feeney’s stupidity may lose him Batman

Labor was having a fairly good day yesterday until David Feeney forgot how many houses he owned.

Truth be told, Labor’s shadow spokesman for Justice wasn’t simply guilty of a momentary lapse of memory. He had forgotten he owned a $2.3 million home for almost three years. His parliamentary register of interests first lodged three months after the election in 2013 and updated twice since failed to include the $2.3 million in Northcote.

Feeney listed his residential home in East Melbourne and an investment property in Melbourne’s inner west.

So a career politician owns not two but three homes. Nice work if you can get it.

It is not the hypocrisy or the amnesia that is the concern here. News of Feeney’s purchase of the Northcote home was published in local newspapers. There is no scandal other than the calumny of an enduring stupidity.

Students of dumb politics would no doubt recall Feeney as one of the conspirators that saw Kevin Rudd being booted out of the Lodge on June 24, 2010. Indeed it was Feeney and his colleague Mark Arbib who convinced Julia Gillard to challenge Rudd and thus consigned not one but two Labor Prime Ministers to the dustbin in one fell swoop.

Arbib scuttled out of politics in 2012. With Labor’s vote tanking in Victoria — something that Feeney was indirectly responsible for — Feeney would not have been re-elected to the Senate so he was parachuted into Batman prior to the 2013 election.

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Batman, which runs through Melbourne’s northern suburbs, was previously held by Labor luminaries Brian Howe and Martin Ferguson. I knew Howe’s predecessor, Horrie Garrick well and while he might have been a fairly undistinguished MHR, I’m sure Horrie, a former Collingwood mayor, would not have forgotten how many houses he owned. The answer, by the way, was one.

Batman was once considered the safest seat in the country. Labor routinely held it by margins upwards of 30 per cent.

Labor in Batman has been under attack from the Greens and Feeney’s stupidity puts the seat further at risk.

The Greens themselves are a risk to national security. Greens leader Senator Di Natale made that clear yesterday when singing to the choir of anti-American sentiment which runs deep in Australia, especially among younger voters.

I’ve often said these people need their heads banged together before being given a brief but comprehensive history lesson on the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Guadalcanal where US Navy and US Marines turned the tide of the Pacific War. Historians hotly argue about Imperial Japan’s designs on Australia. While a full scale invasion may never have been part of their plans, without the US, Australian cities and strategic ports on the eastern seaboard would have faced more attacks and more loss of life. That much is certain.

Di Natale described Australia as a sort of acquiescent partner blindly following the “horrific consequences of US foreign policy.” Predictably he made no mention of Chinese sabre-rattling in the South China Sea.

Under the Greens, the $50 billion purchase of a new fleet of 12 submarines, the purchase of the Joint Strike Fighters and a commitment to spend two per cent of GDP on defence spending into the future would all go.

In a nutshell these steps would reduce the ADF’s capacity to defend our borders and diminish its capacity to respond to hostility in the region.

Similarly, Di Natale’s pledge to create a foreign policy independent of ANZUS Treaty commitments if the Greens ever found themselves in government is akin to putting up a white flag at Cape York and asking whatever belligerent foreign powers that may exist at any time in the future to come in and help themselves.

The fundamental role of government is to defend the nation’s sovereignty. It is not a grab bag of feel good policy.

Of course, the Greens have no chance of forming government in their own right but the way things are shaping up, they may be major players if a hung parliament comes to reality on July 2.

The Coalition’s game in this election is to do two things that ironically are completely distinct — the first is to show Labor and the Greens are cut from the same political cloth while needling away at the policy differences of the two parties.

We never get to hear the repudiation of the Greens on national security grounds. We could argue for days on end about the Greens’ social policies, some of which I regard as sensible (some being the operative word) but these issues are of little moment or significance in the big scheme of things.

Australia’s security in the 21st Century is the primary function of government.

David Feeney’s $2.3 million forgetfulness may be just the thing to put the Greens over the line in what was the former Labor heartland of Batman. The real cost of his stupidity however comes at legitimising the Greens’ most dangerous idea, that national security is a political plaything.