In the giddy afterglow of Kevin07, as the nation’s lefties rejoiced at exorcising the devil that was John Howard, it was assumed that the nation would become a more compassionate place. These same people obviously haven’t been paying attention.
There are now more children in detention than there were under Howard. Right now there’s 1045 of them. Just 28 of them are in community detention; that is, not behind bars but being cared for in private homes, in keeping with the softer policy that Howard introduced in 2005.
One of these children, Seena Aqhlaqi Sheikhdost, was trundled back to Christmas Island this week, a few hours after he had buried his parents. Whether you agree or disagree with mandatory detention, you’d be hard-pressed to argue that locking up a nine-year-old on the day he’s attended his parents’ funeral meets the dictionary definition of compassion.
For the many criticisms Howard faced from progressives, mandatory detention was the source of the most heated abuse. Many of his critics failed or chose not to recognise that the border protection policies his government had in place, and the detention centres it ran, were largely identical to the regime that existed during the Hawke-Keating era. The term “queue-jumper” was first used by Bob Hawke in an interview with A Current Affair.
There were two differences with Howard. The first was simply that he was a conservative, which gave his detractors grounds to dislike him anyway, despite spending the previous 13 years ignoring identical policies. The second was that Howard - unlike Hawke and Keating - chose to politicise mandatory detention by harnessing it as a vote winner in the wake of September 11 and amid the Tampa tragedy. It was probably the most contentious act of his prime ministership. He also won that year’s election in a canter so you’d have to assume that most people agreed with his “we will decide” sentiment.
Against this backdrop, many on the Labor side hailed their 2007 victory as a victory for compassion rather than viewing it more dispassionately (and accurately) as the end of a leader who had outworn his welcome, bungled his succession plan, and alienated the Howard battlers by going too far with WorkChoices.
In government, Labor has learned that compassion is a quickly expendable commodity when things go south in the opinion polls, hence the lurch from a softer border protection policy after the 2007 election to its ad hoc toughening by Kevin Rudd and then Julia Gillard ahead of last year’s campaign. As a result of this vacillation, Labor is a very real risk of ending up in a political no-man’s land.
Superficially, this was regarded as a bad week for the Coalition due to Scott Morrison’s humiliation over his pretty ordinary remarks about the cost of the Christmas Island funerals. This analysis fails to recognise that the Coalition’s problems centred on an individual whereas, for Labor, there’s a broader collective problem with the way their policies are perceived.
Morrison has medium-term leadership ambitions and, as such, might have done himself some serious damage with party moderates by attacking the cost of the funerals while they were under way. None of it is going to cost the Liberals a vote as the type of voters who are energised by this issue would never vote for the Libs in large numbers anyway.
Tony Abbott does have a bigger problem with disunity. The steady stream of leaks from within the party room, particularly the revelation that Morrison had floated a discriminatory immigration policy, which would veto asylum seekers from some Muslim nations, has the potential to paint the Coalition as a rabble. But in terms of the actual policy of border protection, and the way it is being managed, Labor is lumbered with the most acute political headache.
The incarceration of Seena, the nine-year-old Iranian boy, has flushed out many of the once-ferocious critics of mandatory detention, the people I alluded to in the intro who had been active under Howard but fell silent upon Labor’s election in 2007.
Type the word “Seena” into Google and you will be transported to Christian websites, independent news sites, the website of the relaunched lobby group ChilOut, which campaigns for the release of children, where hundreds of people are again firing up about the way we treat asylum seekers.
Many of them would have supported the ALP in 2007, and even again last year despite the toughening of the policy. But there is a hardness about their rhetoric now where they’re accusing the Labor Government of being no different from the Coalition. If these voters shift they’ll be shifting in one direction - the Greens.
On the other side of the divide is a vast number of Australians who would probably applaud a no-Muslim immigration policy, who liked Abbott’s “stop the boats” mantra, who think Labor is as weak as water on this issue. By being too hard to satisfy Lefties and too soft or too disorganised to appease the hardliners, the ALP looks badly stuck on this issue.
Meanwhile, Seena will be released from detention this week. A good result in a situation that should never have occurred. Unless you’re one of those people who thinks that it’s his parents’ fault for having brought him here in the first place.
If you are one of those people, you might want to reflect on the fact that of the 1045 children in detention, more than 500 of them don’t have parents anyway. Their parents are dead. I’m not quite sure how the system works but being an orphan whose parents have been executed in political violence strikes me as a pretty reasonable basis for asylum.
Facebook Recommendations
Read all about it
Punch live
Up to the minute Twitter chatter
RT @Colgo: Read this article on commas. Then see the correction at the end. Ooof! http://t.co/ZkLs6494
RT @cuisinemagazine: Yep, there's always a time for rubbish bread “@ToryShepherd: Imagine a world with multigrain at the sausage sizzle... http://t.co/0K4JyWKH”
Recent posts
The latest and greatest
Protecting the Barrier Reef is the Fin end of the wedge
When you take on a job like being Environment Minister there’s some hits you can see coming. …
ICB: Is white bread the worst thing since sliced bread?
Welcome to this week’s I Call Bullshit column. It’s a regular column that looks at skulduggery…
Sometimes, you’ve just got to stick it to the bloody ref
We are taught early in life that we should not question authority. We must listen to our parents, our…
Nosebleed Section
choice ringside rantings
From: They must pay for one’s bitter disappointments
Michael S says:
"A teacher at Geelong Grammar had criticised her for using words that were too long, which had left her confused and had made her doubt her ability to write essays. She became ''quite distressed'' when her English marks began to fall." I can sympathise. My scholastic mentors conveyed to me a causal relationship… [read more]From: Welfare for breeders is a bonus for everyone
Change Up! says:
I have no problem paying my taxes. As a single, childless person on a very decent income, I can afford it and not have my life severely altered. Plus I understand that my taxes paying for things like schools, childcare and infrastructure is ultimately a good thing. A better community is better for me… [read more]Gentle jabs to the ribs
They must pay for one’s bitter disappointments
A private school girl’s family is sueing her elite, extremely expensive private school for not… Read more
Most commented