Labor places tactics over strategy and politics before policy

Bill Shorten needs to get back to concentrating on policy and strategy. Picture: AAP.

Bill Shorten is ignoring his own sound advice and is beginning to pay a price.

So far, the cost to Labor is not so high that it is giving away the Opposition’s electoral lead and winning prospects for the next election, but it is a warning.

The danger for Labor and the Opposition Leader is that they will be carried away with the concept of “being in control” of the political and parliamentary agenda and push too far.

Last year Shorten correctly adopted the position of letting the infighting within the Liberal and National parties do its own damage and not become contaminated. Shorten made a public virtue of not buying into Liberal leadership divisions and even cited time and again how Scott Morrison kept naming him instead of talking about policy.

But the temptation to exploit “Liberal chaos and division,” coupled with an imperative to force an early election through parliamentary defeats has proved too much.

Trying to create diversions and distractions from the first coherent Coalition attacks on key Labor policies leading into the election, Labor has placed tactics over strategy and politics over policy.

In trying to fend off attacks on Labor’s retiree tax policy and housing investment changes the Opposition concentrates on playing up the Liberal divisions while simultaneously appealing to “compassionate critics” of the government over asylum seekers and border protection.

Instead of letting Coalition MPs eat themselves, Labor is in danger of becoming soiled with the blood and guts of political division by entering the arena and pointing to the gore as the crowd watches in horror of all politics.

More importantly, Labor’s determined appeal to the “compassionate vote” on border protection and attempts to create parliamentary chaos for the Coalition by supporting independent and Greens amendments on medical evacuation of asylum seekers from offshore has made the ALP’s own fraught policy on border protection the issue.

Today Labor is preparing to change its position on so-called medivac bills and to protect ministerial discretion — a discretion three Labor frontbenchers relied on as Immigration Ministers — based on “departmental advice”.

This is an absurd and desperate position for Shorten who backed 19 Labor senators supporting the amendments in the last week of parliament last year and doubled down on the policy at the ALP National conference.

Shorten’s been caught short because the Prime Minister has determinedly put the focus on Labor’s policy and the danger of restarting the people smugglers’ trade and all the chaos and death that goes with it.

Labor wants to kill the debate on border protection and focus on the banks’ appalling behaviour but its paying the price now for appealing to the compassion of voters and trying to create its own parliamentary chaos. Shorten needs to get out of this bind quickly and get back to concentrating on policy and strategy whatever the internal cost before the external cost starts to threaten his electoral lead.