Opinion
As if Anthony Albanese hasn’t stepped on enough landmines already, the deadliest ordnance any Labor government can trigger has just started ticking: boats.
Illegal boat arrivals have been political kryptonite for Labor for decades, ever since John Howard ordered the Tampa turned back. Since then, the pattern has been drearily predictable: the Coalition stops the flood of illegals; Labor gets in and the floodgates are opened again. Rinse and repeat.
Stopping the boats was an election winner for Howard and for Tony Abbott — electoral poison for Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, under whom, multiple boats were arriving daily. When Howard left office, there was one person in immigration detention. Just a few years later, under Rudd and Gillard, there were tens of thousands.
Here we go again…
Another group of foreign nationals have turned up in Western Australia’s remote north, following the discovery of about two dozen men near the tiny Indigenous community of Beagle Bay on Friday morning.
The ABC understands 13 men walked into the Pender Bay campsite, about 30 kilometres north of Beagle Bay, late on Friday afternoon, bringing the total number of arrivals to more than 35.
They told locals they were from Bangladesh and India.
ABC Australia
In other words, queue-jumping economic migrants, not queue-jumping “refugees”.
Under the Abbott-era border protection rules, any boats caught bringing illegals were confiscated and burned. So the people-smuggling cartels, who are a lot smarter than a room full of Labor politicians, have twigged to a new tactic: dump their cargo tens of kilometres from anywhere, and bugger off home before anyone’s the wiser.
Shadow immigration minister Dan Tehan says the government needs to understand how people smugglers have adapted in order to stop them, claiming they have likely become more sophisticated.
Well, all they have to do is read a newspaper.
Mr Tehan blamed the abolition of temporary protection visas and the stripping of $600 million from the border force in the budget for sending a message to people smugglers.
“All these things have sent a message and the people smugglers have said we’ll try again … with a different model.”
If only Labor were so astute or adaptable. Instead of coming up with a new strategy to stop the boats, Labor have fallen back on to screeching at the opposition.
Peter Dutton and the Coalition are undermining Australia’s national security by speaking out publicly about asylum seekers, environment minister Tanya Plibersek says.
Yes, how dare they hold the government to account for what Julia Gillard once called, in words which came back to haunt her badly, “another boat, another policy failure”?
Shadow finance minister Jane Hume, on Monday, said it was concerning that the 40 asylum seekers had arrived “undetected”. She said it shows the “Prime minister (was) distracted elsewhere.”
“The message that has been going out to those people smugglers is the government is not committed to Operation Sovereign Borders … of course this is going to happen,” she told Sky News.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton says the actions of the government, not his comments in the media, are enticing people smugglers to land in Australia, after more than 40 asylum-seekers arrived in remote Western Australia.
“Nobody’s politicising the issue. I think we’re pointing out the fact the Government is making significant errors here,” Mr Dutton told Sunrise.
It started with Albanese’s almost day-one decision to extraordinarily intervene in the case of two ex-Tamil Tigers who’d repeatedly been found not to be genuine refugees, and allow the country-shopping grifters and their anchor babies to stay, it continued with the disastrous decision to free hundreds of violent foreign-born criminals, including murderers, paedophiles and rapists.
“Even if you commit a crime in Australia you will still get a permanent outcome and go into society. These are all messages that are heard by the people smugglers. Nothing to do with us as an Opposition. That’s just the actions of the government,” [Peter Dutton] said.
The Australian
Yet another Labor government has put up a great, big, “Open for Business” sign to Indonesia’s people smugglers. The only problem is that, by the time the bastards are kicked out of office again, we’ll be lumped with tens of thousands more illegals.