Liberals regain mojo as Labor flounders on many fronts

The Liberal Coalition tested its policy prowess and tactical intelligence during the last sitting week of the year. Scott Morrison seized the opportunity to challenge Labor on national security, religious freedom, border protection and counter-terrorism.

The Prime Minister introduced a new rule to neutralise the most powerful weapon left in Labor’s arsenal, Liberal leadership instability. By the end of the week the promise of a landslide Labor victory in the coming federal election was no longer assured. The Coalition is back in business. The government accrued political capital last week by outman­oeuvring Labor on several fronts. It drew on Liberal philosophy and policy substance to win the battle in the public square. Defeatism has been the prevailing spirit in Liberal Coalition ranks for months. The era of despondency is over. The fight to win the unwinnable election has begun.

The Coalition successfully challenged Labor, forcing a series of defeats in the areas of policy, politics and public debate. Labor failed to win support for a bill that would compromise religious freedom on the pretext of preventing some future hypothetical case of a gay student being excluded from a school. The bill reinforced the impression that Labor’s pursuit of identity politics conceals a lack of political sophistication and policy nous. The opposition dragged its heels on a government bill aimed at empowering security services to track paedophiles and terrorists.

Bill Shorten’s decision to back amendments to offshore processing while suspending judgment on encryption laws left Labor open to attack. Morrison criticised Labor’s cheap politicking. In these pages, he pointed out that Islamic extremists and criminals commonly used encrypted technology to evade detection. Federal agencies revealed that 95 per cent of targets used encrypted technology. Morrison concluded that Labor and the Greens had decided to “obstruct our vital encryption legislation as part of their political game playing”. The game was holding counter-terrorism reform hostage to amendments that would weaken border security.

Labor backed the encryption laws by week’s end, but the damage was done. The government had the opposition on the back foot for the first time in months. It reset the debate by casting the ALP as an enabler of the people-smuggling trade. The last time Labor was in government, its border policy resulted in more than 50,000 people entering Australia illegally and more than 1000 deaths at sea. Attorney-General Christian Porter flayed the opposition for taking $16 billion from taxpayers to fund its border security disaster. Despite its record of incompetence in security matters, Labor has joined the Greens and the crossbench to dismantle the government’s border policy.

They are yet to provide a well-reasoned argument to support the radical policy shift. Their major points of contention are children in offshore immigration centres and the provision of medical care to asylum-seekers. Yet the weak border policy adopted by Labor during its previous term resulted in 8000 children being held in detention. According to the Prime Minister, the government has reduced the number of children in immigration detention from 8000 to almost none. Given the data, it is fair to conclude that weak borders do not help asylum-seekers. But it doesn’t stop open border activists using children as political pawns to win public debate by manipulating emotions rather than appealing to reason.

Shorten’s decision to change Labor’s position on border security is likely to backfire. The ALP is hoodwinking the public by framing weak borders as compassionate policy.

Labor’s left faction plans to change the party’s position on offshore processing at the ALP national conference next weekend.

As reported in The Weekend Australian, it plans to fast-track transfers of asylum-seekers to Australia on the basis of medical need. It echoes independent MP Kerryn Phelps’s proposed amendment to the Migration Act that will empower medical practitioners to order the transfer of asylum-seekers to Australia. The immi­gration minister could refuse the transfer only on national security grounds. The Australian’s Chris Kenny reported that 460 of the 494 people brought to Australia for medical care from Nauru and Manus Island hadn’t left. Given the numbers, it is reasonable to question whether medical transfers are a backdoor method of entering Australia.

Labor and the Greens are supporting the proposed rule changes to immigration. If they succeed, it will effect a gross distortion of democratic process by handing powers to choose who enters Australia from a government elected by the people to unelected officials. It doesn’t matter whether the officials have a degree in medicine or fashion, they have not earned the democratic right to determine who enters our country.

The authoritarian Left is characterised by an anti-democratic tendency. The emergence of the populist Right stems, in part, from the illegitimate rule of an unelected political class that enforces PC orthodoxy. Rule by unelected officials is not rule by the people. If green-left MPs want to challenge Australian democracy by giving unelected officials the power to compromise secure border policy, they should put the idea to the public at the next election.

Medecins Sans Frontieres is one of the expert groups backing Phelps’s bill. It has demanded the immediate evacuation of all refugees and asylum-seekers from Nauru, stating they “must have fast access to permanent resettlement, alongside their families”.

The assumption may be that MSF is particularly offended by Australian border security, but it engages in such activism internationally. It has criticised attempts to stop unauthorised boats entering Europe from Africa. Gabriele Eminente, MSF director in Italy, said: “This year alone, more than 2000 people have perished in the Mediterranean … others continue to take the dangerous sea journey.”

If MSF wants to stop the deaths at sea, it should recommend Australia’s conservative approach to border security that saves lives by turning back boats and removing the financial incentive for people-smugglers to set sail.

Weak borders, divisive identity politics, the attack on core freedoms and undemocratic rule by PC elites are the hallmarks of government by green-left MPs. Elect them at your peril.