There’s been a bit of a debate over the rhetorical dimension of the government’s messages about asylum seekers. Is Kevin Rudd playing bad cop to Stephen Smith’s good cop? With Senator Chris Evans as straight man, and loud denunciator of the evils of the opposition’s inhumanity… (They richly deserve the condemnation, though. Even Malcolm Turnbull looked embarrassed trying on his Howardian “we will decide who comes to this country” lines in parliament the other day).
The truth is that this scenario is probably about right. It’s all part of the Rudd government’s famous balancing act.
But the more important questions go unanswered. Why are no political leaders prepared to speak the truth about why there’s so much angst out there about asylum seekers in the first place. Why won’t commentators stop hiding behind characterisations of the issue as “emotional”? (And I heard two journos on the ABC radio this morning dancing around the topic, while seeming to pat themselves on the back over the cleverness of the phrase “the Indonesian solution”.)
Bob Ellis puts these questions plainly:
Am I alone in finding this bizarre? If letting “these people” in is a disastrous idea, can we name one, just one, who shouldn’t be here? Who has proved a bad citizen? Just one? If not, what are we talking about? Who are we protecting ourselves from? Why are we burning their rescuers’ boats? If the refugees were Swiss or Belgian or white South Africans or white Zimbabweans, would we be making this fuss? If there were votes lost taking them why did Peter Andren triple his majority in 2001, three months after Tampa, by saying we should let them in? Argued his case well, I guess.
Memories
John Howard is on the front page of the Sydney Sunday Telegraph proclaiming “I’d stop the boats!”…
Meanwhile, all week since the Newspoll likely outlier, the tone of the media coverage and commentary has shifted. Glenn Milne, with his accustomed lack of subtlety, gives the game away in his column today, claiming that the effects of the poll are “real”, even if it’s wrong.
This claim is supported by the usual panoply of quotes from unnamed senior Liberal sources, and the press gallery line du jour – that Turnbull can succeed by making the government the issue (and by having no policy on anything – asylum seekers or otherwise – which would actually allow him to be scrutinised). That needs to be considered along with that other recurrent media theme – that they (and the opposition) perform a valuable public service by keeping the government accountable. In truth, it’s all about the drama and the sense of power.
I, for one, am still not convinced that the asylum seekers “crisis” is one. I doubt many voters are really all that concerned. Australian politics – except in the mind of the political class itself – is not stuck in an eternal loop. Howard’s use of the Tampa was exemplary of an ability he once had to exploit elements of the national mood – it worked not because Australians are inherently xenophobic, but because it channeled a set of fears and anxieties characteristic of a particular cultural moment and projected them towards refugees. In the longer view, it was in some ways the end of an era where the Hansonite outbreaks were already a last gasp.
A secular shift in the register of issues, and the particular take on the asylum seeker brouhaha, had already happened by the beginning of 2007, and was itself a harbinger of Howard’s defeat. Among related reasons for his defeat was the fact that the electorate got tired of loud, noisy symbolic political clashes and culture wars. I think Rudd knew that then, and knows that now, and that’s why his calm demeanour works.
So, I’m not at all certain that many outside the Canberra beltway are actually paying attention to the “crises”. The noise itself might be a turnoff.
And, as noted by a number of commenters on the open thread, missing in all the media talk has been not just the Essential Research poll which was taken at the same time as the Newspoll, but also Morgan on Friday – another sample taken simultaneously. It’s not at all unreasonable to believe that the message from these two polls is that all this is just a preoccupation of the Canberra elites. Which is ironic, when you think about it – because populism employed in the service of naked electoral self interest, the desire for Sturm und Drang and on the backs of the poor and dispossessed of the world is not always an electoral winner. Which is good.