On a frantic parliamentary night in late August 2001, all bedlam and trilling division bells, I called in, as I did most nights as the Canberra chief of staff at the Australian Financial Review, to page one conference in Sydney.
I relayed the news that Kim Beazley had announced Labor would vote against retrospective legislation proposed by John Howard giving his government the power to remove a Norwegian freighter, the Tampa, which had picked up 433 asylum seekers. Australian SAS troops had taken control of the ship.
My editor thanked me for the update, and asked me to explain the significance of the development. We didn’t write much about boat arrivals at the Fin. Given our business audience, it wasn’t one of our regular policy beats, so the editor’s question to me was: is this a big political story?
“Beazley has just lost the election,” I said, utterly certain of the projection I was making – which is unusual, because my resting disposition tends more towards doubt than certainty.
It really was that clear, and this was before the horrendous terrorist attacks in New York on September 11 strengthened John Howard’s political position even further, projecting him towards his election win a couple of months later.
Also clear, incidentally, was Beazley’s decision for rebuffing Howard on the legislation. The Labor leader told the prime minister he was playing “wedge politics, all of it in the last couple of weeks of this parliament”.
“Well, I tell you … prime minister, we will not be in it. Whatever particular political advantage you think it gives you – we will not be in it”.
I mention the Tampa because it has been around in dispatches for much of this week, with commentators wondering whether Bill Shorten has just chalked up his Beazley moment, and lost the unlosable election by supporting the medical evacuations bill.
Let’s just state the obvious: despite all the chin-stroking and soothsaying on the rolling news channels, nobody yet knows whether this week will be seen down the track as a turning point in the major-party contest, or not.
I don’t have the certainty I had in 2001 that Labor has thrown away an election.
What can be known is this. Labor has opened a point of difference with the government on the treatment of asylum seekers, although the point of difference, measured in substance as opposed to heightened political rhetoric, is not as massive as the government would have you believe.
Conventional political wisdom says Labor saying something other than “me too” on asylum carries risks. Labor MPs know that choice could cost votes on its right flank, among working people, and in the outer suburbs, because a deep cultural anxiety about protecting the borders of an island continent resonates with some voters and in some parts of the country, particularly in disrupted times when politicians around the world are trying to play the strong man, to profit from a projection of wall building, either figuratively, or in Donald Trump’s case – literally.
Objectively, it’s risky. But I’d also note a couple of other things.
I think Australians have seen this particular show before. I reckon Australians can identify a government, just shy of an election, on the prowl for a knockout blow. Polls suggest Australians are pretty angry with this particular government, and that resting disposition in the community makes it more difficult to mount a full-throated scare campaign and be believed by an audience fatigued with your shtick.
I also think when you are the prime minister, with all the responsibilities of that office, it’s a very fine line between projecting “I’m a manly man who will keep all the scary people away” and looking like you are whistling up new boats for a bit of cheap partisan advantage five minutes before an election you are obviously worried about losing – which is what Morrison found himself being accused of this week.
Now I’m not saying that aggressively negative political campaigns don’t work. They absolutely do. Look at the potency of Labor’s “Mediscare” campaign in the 2016 election. Good scare campaigns transform dormant issues into salient, vote-changing concerns. That’s why politicians deploy them, even though voters claim to hate them.
But to work, you’ve got to be believed on the fundamentals, and it’s harder to be believed on the fundamentals when hyperbole substitutes for facts, as it did so often this week, with government people actively misleading the public about basic facts with the medical evacuations bill.
So to summarise our situation report – a number of Australians are anxious in general, and distinctly wary about boat people in particular, but Australians also don’t like being dished up self-serving bullshit by politicians.
Now speaking of bullshit, I want to talk about truth. It matters, even in politics. Without facts and verification, we slide into Trumpism, and I mean this next observation as a compliment: Scott Morrison, you are no Donald Trump.
Morrison wants to make this issue a test of character with his political opponent, and that’s fine, because politics is replete with testosterone-laden tedium of this nature – but for the sake of the voting public, I think this conversation also needs to be a test of truth, and who is prepared to tell it.
It needs to be a test of truth just intrinsically, because without a set of agreed facts we all slide further into conflict and irresolvable contention, and the public square just becomes a cluster of snarling enclaves rather than a place where synthesis happens and the national interest is served.
I don’t want to live in that place. If we live in that place, representative politics has no mandate, and journalism is a pointless pursuit.
But it also needs to be a test of truth because of the history of how this issue has been deployed on previous occasions in Australian politics when the general political atmosphere is heightened.
The infamous “children overboard” incident of October 2001 is probably the most egregious example. If you are too young to remember the details, on 7 October of that year Philip Ruddock told the media that a number of children had been thrown overboard from a vessel intercepted by the defence force.
John Howard repeated the story. Peter Reith, then defence minister said it. There was only one problem: it never happened.
According to the findings of a Senate inquiry, Reith was informed by defence personnel in October and November that children were not thrown from the vessel. But Reith didn’t inform Howard until 7 November, and “despite direct media questioning on the issue, no correction, retraction or communication about the existence of doubts in connection with either the alleged incident itself or the photographs as evidence for it was made by any member of the federal government before the election on 10 November 2001”.
I think this anecdote speaks for itself. It says, when it comes to politicians banging drums about border protection in the shadow of elections, journalists need to turn up to work, and voters need to be on high alert.