Australia is in the midst of a somewhat odd election general campaign. The Prime Minister running for re-election, Welsh-born Julia Gillard, took over the Labor leadership barely a month ago when her predecessor Kevin Rudd was ousted in a party coup. Rudd had been due to fly to Toronto for the G20 summit the day his premiership was emphatically abbreviated, without even the need for a ballot of Labor MPs.
Gillard’s opponent is the conservative Liberal Tony Abbott. He became opposition leader only last December, following an acrimonious leadership challenge. Neither a “red Tory” nor a “green Tory”, Abbott once memorably described climate change as “crap”.
While Abbott reminds voters of the failings that led Labor to dump Rudd, Gillard has been making the case for a fresh start for her party in office.
If the nature of the contest is unusual, the terrain on which it is being fought might also surprise. On the night of the campaign’s only televised leaders’ debate, a camera crew fetched up at a Western Sydney pub to gauge public sentiment. Western Sydney is home to a string of marginal constituencies and faces all the challenges of rapid urban sprawl. Nevertheless, when an elderly gentleman was asked to name the key issue of the campaign, he nominated asylum seekers.
He is not alone. This year has seen an increase in the number of asylum seekers heading to Australia by boat. Community concerns have risen, fanned by media scaremongering.
A popular Sydney radio presenter told his audience that: “We are importing murderers”. One right-wing columnist denigrated asylum seekers as “in truth, people after a richer life”. Another expressed his outrage over “happy Afghan women and children shopping at a suburban mall”. When the government housed some asylum seekers in a Brisbane suburb, a headline warning: “They’re here” appeared in the local newspaper.
The opposition, too, has seized on the issue and has charged the government with losing control of Australia’s borders. The shadow justice minister accused the government of “putting Australian lives at risk”. Asylum seekers have been variously disparaged as “queue jumpers”, “illegal people” and – according to one MP – possible terrorists. Opposition MPs have spoken approvingly of Italy’s infamous deal with the Gaddafi regime, under which asylum seekers en route to Italy are forcibly returned to Libya. The opposition leader even raised the spectre of “millions” of asylum seekers attempting to reach Australia by boat in the future.
This messaging has been very effective. According to a recent survey, a quarter of Australians think that tens of thousands of “boat people’, at least, arrive in Australia each year, while a further 30 per cent said they “don’t know” how many asylum seekers arrive by boat. In reality, a total of around 20,000 asylum seekers have arrived in Australia by boat over 20 years. The steady drip of alarmism has fostered a sense of crisis where none exists.
It was a misperception the Rudd government proved unable to correct. Disapproval of Labor’s handling of asylum seekers contributed to a dramatic collapse of public confidence in Rudd and in support for the government. At a June by-election in the Western Sydney state seat of Penrith, voters registered a 25 per cent swing against Labor. A government MP said of the rout: “We are bleeding to death on this. Everywhere you went in Penrith, they were talking about boat people.”
Within days, Rudd was gone. At a hastily convened press conference the night Gillard brought on the challenge, Rudd declared that under his continued leadership the government would “not be lurching to the right on the question of asylum seekers as some have counselled us to do”. The next morning, the new Labor leader Gillard emphasised that she understood “that Australians are disturbed when they see boats arrive on our shores unannounced. I can understand that Australians are disturbed by that.”
Soon, Gillard announced a plan to build a “regional processing centre”, to which all asylum seekers making for Australia by boat would be sent, and nominated impoverished Timor-Leste as the location. She again emphasised: “It is wrong to label people who have concerns about unauthorised arrivals as ‘rednecks’.”
Timor-Leste’s Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao – a veteran of the long guerrilla struggle against Indonesia – responded to reporters’ questions about the Gillard plan by posing one of his own. “What plan?” he asked, looking irritated and unenthused. Talks are continuing.
Rudd’s ineffectual management of community perceptions, Gillard’s placatory rhetoric and her “Timor solution” all point to one conclusion: despite the facts and figures, the politics of asylum are diabolically difficult for Labor.
When the conservatives choose to run hard on an “armada”, “tsunami” and “flood” of asylum seekers, as they have this year, Labor is squeezed between two constituencies: outer suburbanites, who are often suspicious of uninvited “queue-jumpers”, and inner-city progressives who tend to be concerned about human rights.
The outraged progressive vote tends to lean towards the Greens, who are poised to take the balance of power in the Senate and are competitive in the Labor heartland seat of Melbourne. But the main game for Labor is staving off a revolt in the “mortgage belt” seats that could cost it power. So the government must sympathise with community anxiety, emphasise its border security measures and claim common ground with the opposition, even as it seeks to withstand the opposition’s fear campaign. Labor remains ahead of the opposition in most polls, but any incident similar to Gordon Brown’s “bigoted woman” exchange could spell electoral disaster.
The campaign, thus far tightly-managed and low-key, has been dismissed by some commentators as a “Seinfeld election” – in other words, a show about nothing. But on the asylum issue much is at stake. The opposition has pledged to turn boats back on the high seas, send all asylum seekers to the tiny island state of Nauru and grant only temporary protection to those it finds to be refugees. It would also introduce a “presumption” that people suspected of destroying identity documents would be “denied refugee status”.
Other governments, which must deal with an influx of asylum seekers far greater than that Australia must accommodate, will note with interest the direction that Australia chooses to take.
