Banks and borders too important for political games - The Australian Financial Review
Serious long-term policy decisions on banking, energy and the integrity of national borders risk being crunched into the last few weeks of a Parliament, there more as objects of political party brinkmanship than considered debate. The government does not have control over the numbers on the floor of the House of Representatives, its one-seat win in 2016 now reduced by defection and byelection loss to dependence on the crossbenches to keep it afloat. Labor wants to focus on the banks, where it can accuse the government of deliberate inaction on the Hayne royal commission findings if it does not allow more time for debate. Labor could also test the government's authority on the medical evacuation of sick asylum seekers from Manus island. Control of Australia's borders has been a defining issue for the Coalition, and a loss might be tantamount to a vote of no confidence. It would allow Labor and allied crossbenchers to push the government out of office several months early, depriving the Coalition of priceless weeks when it might turn its polling fortunes around, get its budget away, and look like it is still in charge of events.
The asylum seeker issue has cost the Coalition support among professional middle class voters and played into the loss of Malcolm Turnbull's former Sydney seat of Wentworth to independent and medical doctor Kerryn Phelps, who is putting up the bill which will allow doctors to decide who comes in from Manus. But Mr Shorten knows he is playing with fire as well. Any hint of a return to Labor's chaotic era of uncontrolled boat arrivals and people smugglers is unpopular with his working class and suburban supporters and even many one-time migrant voters in the western suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne (those in Labor seats who voted against same-sex marriage). Mr Shorten, too, has been forced to backpedal as Mr Morrison has gone into overdrive on border security, and he will now take advice from the security services as well as doctors. The fault lines that have opened up on the right of politics also lurk on the left. As shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen says on the boatpeople issue, Labor "will have to make some decisions that some people, including Labor voters, don't agree with".
Avoided turmoil
Those Labor voters include the left-progressives in the party's branches. The irony is that the Coalition's tough border policy helps explain why Australia's immigration debate has not reached the toxic levels of the US and Europe. In the northern hemisphere, economic insecurity plus apparently runaway immigration queues have helped to drive political loyalties away from traditional class divisions towards culture and identity, and battles between voters whose sensibilities are local and those more globally minded. It leads to the Trumpian obsession with border walls, "take back control" Brexit, and the alarming rise of right and left-wing populists in the parliaments of Europe. It has left mainstream politics around the world struggling to find its bearings. But secure borders and 27 years without a recession mean that Australia has avoided this political turmoil.
There are rifts on both left and right over refugee issues. Wayne Taylor
Yet there are shadows of those divisions in this country. While the Liberals have felt the electoral blowback from their more affluent supporters over the treatment of asylum seekers, in NSW both parties are responding to urban congestion pressures from immigration and population growth. Offshore detention has been a tough policy choice that the Coalition has been moving to defuse by moving as many asylum seekers off Manus island as quickly as possible. But the Pacific hellholes are a myth, however much bleak uncertainty many individuals might have faced.
0 Response to "Banks and borders too important for political games - The Australian Financial Review"
Post a Comment