It’s been a long, hard parliamentary week in the fast lane. Let’s step into the slow lane and take the time to think about five interesting developments.
1. Penetrating glimpses of the obvious: citizenship
Malcolm Turnbull, the communications minister, has been saying for a fortnight or so that it’s a sound idea to make sure that laws enacted by the parliament conform with the requirements of the Australian constitution.
The shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, said on Thursday that people who commit crimes under Australian law should return to face punishment under the law. Both statements, to borrow a Turnbullism from the week, are penetrating glimpses of the obvious. Yet both statements were characterised in various febrile quarters as vaguely treasonous: wild talk by wild men.
Tony Abbott, by contrast, produced some of his characteristic aggressive simplicity: he didn’t want those jihadis back in Australia. This was a short, sharp, simple, declarative statement, designed to pass the front bar “nod” test. “I don’t want them back.” (Keep the bad guys off our soil, Tony? You bet you are. You bet I am.) Except if you think about it for five seconds. The prime minister’s first problem with “never darken our door” is that sole citizens can continue to come back. At this stage, the government is only proposing citizenship revocations for dual nationals.
The second curiosity about the statement is this: can the prime minister really be sanguine about jihadis remaining at large as long as they don’t make landfall on the island continent of Australia?
On the face of it, this is pretty unorthodox reasoning from a political leader. Let’s apply that same logic to other mass murders. Are we comfortable with the only sanction against other types of mass murderers being they aren’t allowed to set foot in Australia any more?
I suspect we’re not really comfortable with that. It’s more conventional to want to see criminals put behind bars, which is precisely why the government told us only a few months ago that we needed new powers to prosecute returning foreign fighters, and the parliament duly obliged. Under the revised foreign fighters regime, the government was going to be stopping the bad guys at airports and dispatching them promptly to the jail house. Now we no longer aim to prosecute them, apparently. We don’t want them back. As they say in the classics, go figure.
2. June and July are the cruellest months
April is the cruellest month, the great poet TS Eliot told us in The Wasteland, but for Bill Shorten, June and July are looking truly character-forming. The Labor leader has to deal with the high-rating grotesque that is The Killing Season; he has to deal with Abbott’s clear and present ambition to belt him out of studious neutrality on national security; and, perhaps happiest of all, he has to deal with the comrades –past comrades at the royal commission into trade unions, and present comrades at the party’s national conference in July. Shorten’s got to face all these challenges knowing that Labor’s poll success is not built on him cutting through successfully as opposition leader, but on persistent dislike of the other guy. Shorten is also surrounded by parliamentary colleagues who wanted him to be the federal leader not out of love or loyalty, or because they absolutely believed him to be the right man for the times, but because they wanted and needed the Shorten cycle of ambition to run its natural course.
Given Shorten had spent years styling himself as “the next most likely”, he’d either deliver in the leadership, and Labor would prosper, or he wouldn’t, and that would be that, the end of the Big Bill Run. Let’s be clear about this. It’s absolutely not Shorten’s fault – the decision by colleagues to take part in an ABC documentary in which they willingly re-enact (in some cases literally) their own mad leadership coup culture, the manifest betrayal of their base and voters and supporters – but unfortunately he has to deal with the obvious framing question thrown up by this last political week. Is Shorten the man to lead Labor past the intrigues and manifest failures of the Rudd/Gillard period? Is he the man to atone and reconnect? Or is he in fact part of Labor’s problem?
3. We are paying people smugglers? You really can’t be serious
The idea of spooks floating about on the seas to our north paying people smugglers to make sure asylum seekers don’t end up anywhere near Australia underscores just how unhinged the domestic debate about asylum seekers has become.
If this actually happened – and of course we don’t know if it did or didn’t because there are no straight answers to questions – this goes well beyond the boundaries of strategic disruption activity by law enforcement. We are now taking part in, and providing perverse incentives to, a trade that has always been characterised quite correctly as unlawful and absolutely immoral.
So how have we come to this sorry pass? Having manufactured a “crisis” around a normal human activity, the idea that people come in boats to seek Australia’s protection, Australian major party politics is now completely hostage to a negative perception that it manufactured and stoked for it own cynical ends. If the boats carrying asylum seekers do come, then politics has not stopped “the boats crisis”, which was never actually a crisis in the first place.
Given such high stakes, given a complete non-issue has been hyped into a “test of resolve”, you can see how such a trajectory builds in risk – the risk that governments will make very poor judgments and insist that officials implement their very poor judgments. Nobody is really thinking about the long-term consequences of these decisions, only on winning the next 24 hours and the 24 hours after that. And the human cost is already high and escalating. This really is crazy. Something has to give.
4. Trade. It’s tricky, and might get trickier
It’s strange that signing a landmark free trade deal with China can fly mostly below the radar but this was a crowded week in Canberra.
The text of the bilateral deal hammered out between Beijing and Canberra finally hit the public domain and it’s clear that management challenges lie ahead for both the major parties. Let me explain.
Labor is finding it harder to sell trade liberalisation to its base, because both the progressive grassroots left and the industrial left are inclined in contemporary times to see the costs of liberalisation more starkly than the benefits. It’s too soon to say what the end result will be on the China FTA but my feeling now is the labour provisions and the investor-state dispute settlement clause will be a hard sell in the ALP caucus.
The government also has jitters within its ranks. The agriculture minister, Barnaby Joyce, doesn’t want state-owned enterprises buying the Aussie farm. He’s made this abundantly clear. Joyce is the boundary rider here. His view isn’t the government’s official policy position but the Nationals view of the world has already influenced government positioning on foreign investment. The main parties are being pulled incrementally off an orthodoxy that once seemed unshakable in Australia: trade is good. The next big cab off the rank is the trans-Pacific partnership. If that deal does manage to take off from the runway in Washington, it’s safe to predict that it will face a hard landing in Canberra. Watch this space.
5. A victory for intuitive reasoning
I did cover this contribution in the live blog this week but it warrants a mention here as we close out our five topics of interest for the weekend.
This week we heard the usual level of nonsense that comes during any given parliamentary week. Surround-sound nonsense is a given. But we also heard a lone voice in the Senate take us through how decent people can get to the heart of very profound things if they take the time to think and empathise.
The crossbench senator Ricky Muir spoke in a chamber debate late on Thursday about legalising same-sex marriage. He took fellow senators on a journey about how he’d come to this position. He’d listened to people. He’d been alarmed by the statistics on depression and suicide. He’d known people in his community who felt marginalised.
Muir had some interests and pastimes that might not win universal acclaim, but life wasn’t about getting hung up on that. Life was about living. In Muir’s view, it was time to make a gesture to good people who had suffered and faced discrimination, well ... for no good reason.
Muir summarised his view on ending state-sanctioned discrimination in this way: “We are not all the same, and all people have the right to live their lives without judgment. I like to live my own life without judgment, and I like to return the favour.” More power to your arm, Ricky.
