Opinion
The Albanese government is in grave political danger — and seems as blithely unaware of it as they were of the groundswell of opposition to the Voice referendum. For all his chutzpah, Anthony Albanese seems too often to forget that his government was elected with the second-lowest Labor vote in the party’s history. In any previous election, a 32% primary vote would have meant a landslide loss for Labor.
Latest polls indicate that its vote has slipped even lower. But, as in Tasmania this weekend, voters are deserting the two-party system in droves: nearly one-third polled by Newspoll chose anyone other than the major parties.
Things are certainly unlikely to improve for Albanese: the cost-of-living crisis shows no sign of abating, with housing being put under increasing pressure from Labor’s addiction to record-high migration.
Meanwhile, a repeated electoral poison pill for Labor is slowly, inexorably entering the political bloodstream: border control.
The left media in Australia seems as incurious as many members of the government are about federal Labor’s handling of refugee detainees.
The story, though, is slowly growing beyond even the media-left’s control. “Botched” is too kind a word to apply to Labor’s criminally incompetent response to the High Court “NZYQ” case. While that case only applied to literally one person, Labor panicked and turned loose hundreds of foreign-born murderers, rapists and child molesters. While, even then, they were required to submit to police monitoring including ankle bracelets, Labor quietly removed even those modest requirements. Several of the freed criminals have since been re-arrested on serious charges, while others have simply disappeared.
Then there are the boats.
The government’s approach to the NZYQ case is reminiscent of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years when only the sight of people drowning off a boat being dashed into the cliffs of Christmas Island in December 2010 persuaded ministers that 50,000 people making landfall here by boat, many without passports or identifying documents, was a serious issue.
The asylum seeker policy failure was despite Kevin Rudd telling The Australian’s Paul Kelly and Dennis Shanahan in his last interview before the 2007 election that, if elected, he would turn back boats if necessary. Yet most detainees here came during the Rudd and Gillard years.
The current government has lamentable form, here. Albanese was Rudd’s deputy PM, while now-Immigration Minister Andrew Giles worked on the legal team for the Tampa illegal immigrants in 2001.
Some Labor supporters and left journalists this year even trotted out the old line that most asylum seekers here arrive legally by plane. The correct reply now, as back in the Rudd-Gillard years, is that people do not board planes overseas to fly to Australia without passports and proper documentation, but people trafficked here by boat are encouraged to dump their passports at sea.
This is why Border Force and ASIO spend so much time and money checking the backgrounds of people who arrive by boat.
The Australian
And make no mistake: the boats are back. To damn them with faint praise, it’s obvious that people smuggling cartels are far smarter than the Albanese government.
Their latest tactic is to dump boatloads of illegals at remote parts of the West Australian coast, apparently on the (so far correct) assumption that it will be days, if not weeks before a stripped-back Border Force even realises.
Australian Border Force officers were sent to the remote Dampier Peninsula north of Broome on Friday in response to a report of freshly dumped clothes and food from Indonesia, prompting speculation of a new and undetected boat arrival close to the beach where two groups of asylum-seekers came ashore last month.
Some Aboriginal residents of the peninsula are convinced the discovery indicates another and more recent undetected asylum boat arrival because the items were not at the site when the last known arrivals were taken into custody and transferred to Nauru.
The Australian
So, Aborigines on ride-on mowers (I’m not making that up) are proving more effective at detecting illegal boat arrivals than Border Force? Tell me this isn’t a government operation.
More ominously, it’s reported that vehicle tracks were also found in the area, indicating that people smugglers have a local contact ready to pick up the illegal arrivals and help them vanish into the community.
The West has previously obtained videos showing boats packed with people believed to be from Indonesia in waters off the Kimberley coast, and footage of rubbish left on Vansittart Bay – a protected island in the region.
The West Australian
The government is, of course, denying that anything untoward is going on.
But then, that’s what the last Labor government said, back in 2007. We all know how that went.