Turnbull’s mistake was made with Obama

Malcolm Turnbull’s mistake with the Americans was strategic, not tactical, and involved Barack Obama, not Donald Trump.

Despite the leak in The Washington Post of details of an apparently testy and robust conversa­tion between the Prime Minister and the President, there is nothing in this that Turnbull has handled poorly or that suggests Australia doesn’t have a high standing in Washington.

The fact Trump will endorse at any level, and with whatever qualifications, a deal made by Obama to take in Muslim refugees — a deal that contradicts one of the main issues on which Trump won the presidency — is a message that under­lines the potency of Australia’s standing in Washington.

Too much is being made of Trump’s leaked testy language, confirmed later by the presidential tweet saying Obama’s deal on the illegal immigrants was “dumb” and he would study it.

Trump spoke to Turnbull at the end of a long day and he was tired and terse. Turnbull was virtually begging him to honour Obama’s deal and finally Trump agreed, but then decided he’d spent enough emotional effort on Australia.

We shouldn’t get too sanctimonious about the horror of leaks. It’s not only the Americans who do this sort of thing.

Kevin Rudd connived in the leaking of a highly flattering, and factually contested, private conversation he had with president George W. Bush about the G20.

Nor do prime ministers always have first encounters of loving bliss with presidents. When John Howard as prime minister went to Washington to see Bill Clinton for the first time, he got 20 minutes with the president, who wouldn’t even do a joint press conference.

When Jimmy Carter hosted Malcolm Fraser, the Australian made such an impression on him that Carter kept calling him John Fraser at their press conference.

Trump’s reluctance to commit to actual numbers to be resettled in the US from Manus Island or Nauru is no different from Obama’s. The Obama administration gave Turnbull an “announceable”, a media event, a virtual solution to the resettlement issue which itself did not guarantee that the US would take a single person unless it was satisfied through its own vetting procedures.

That Australia took a few people­ from a camp in Costa Rica as a quid pro quo is meaningless. There is no cost to Australia in substituting a few Central Americ­ans for others in its refugee intake.

But the design of the deal itself is problematic, because it gives people-smugglers a magnificent new version of the old product they have always been selling, an immigration outcome in a first-world country.

The battle of wills between the Australian government and the people-smugglers has been the deter­mination by Canberra to refuse to allow the act of coming to Australia illegally by boat to result in a permanent first-world immig­ration outcome.

Australia arranged resettlement in various third-world countries — not paradise, but places where refugees would certainly not be persecuted.

The US deal represented a kind of capitulation from Canberra. It suggests that the old tactic of outwaiting the Australian government is effective eventually.

If the US deal does go ahead, and Labor should get into government next time and abolish temporary protection visas, there is every prospect the people-smuggling business would roar back into life, with all the loss of life and threat to Australian sovereignty it brought last time.

The other problem with the deal was that it used up way too much of Australia’s strategic capit­al with Washington for an issue of no real strategic significance. It is certainly a bad way to start things off with the new administration.

The Turnbull government, like most international observers, did not think Trump would win. Once the deal was done with Obama, and announced publicly, Turnbull inevitably had to do all he could to keep it going with Trump.

But it has for the moment distorted our relationship with Wash­ington and become what we had the chance of not becoming — just another supplicant begging favours. That’s not the right way to approach Trump.

Incidentally, Turnbull was right not to join in the hysterical overreaction to Trump’s immig­ration restrictions. Nobody ever said Trump would make life easy.