Culture

Bill Shorten Massively Drops The Ball, Refuses To Back Premiers’ Call To Let Asylum Seekers Stay

All this opposition to offshore detention could use a leader.

by Alex McKinnon  8 February 2016

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Over the weekend Australia experienced something pretty unusual: political leaders scrambling to one-up each other on who could come up with the most compassionate response to a group of refugees. After Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews publicly offered to take the 267 asylum seekers due to be sent back to Nauru on Saturday, no less than five of his counterparts followed suit: the Premiers or Chief Ministers of New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT have all put their hands up indicating their state or territory is ready and willing to settle the asylum seekers.

The action of the Premiers and Chief Ministers, combined with the growing number of churches offering sanctuary to the held asylum seekers and a number of large demonstrations planned around the country later today, amount to considerable political pressure on the government to rethink its mandatory offshore detention policy. While Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has so far held firm in his commitment that no asylum seekers who arrive by boat will be resettled in Australia, it’s rare for alternative arguments to gain so much traction among some of the country’s most powerful people.

Federal Labor’s been conspicuously quiet on the abominable treatment meted out to asylum seekers in Australia’s offshore detention centres under the Abbott/Turnbull governments, largely because it matches the abominable treatment meted out under the Rudd/Gillard governments. It was Gillard who reopened the previously closed camps in late 2011, while it was 2013-era Rudd who promised asylum seekers arriving by boat would never be settled in Australia.

All of which leaves the modern Labor Party in a bind — they can’t embrace a more compassionate asylum seeker policy without repudiating the one laid out by their old leaders, but adhering to the government’s approach results in minor PR blunders like raped refugee women being denied access to abortions and children expressing a desire to commit mass suicide. Their approach to solving this dilemma thus far isn’t terribly clear, but mostly seems to consist of mumbling something about expedited processing times and hoping no one pays very close attention.

Which brings us to titular Leader of the Opposition Bill Shorten. The strong stance of his state-based colleagues has left Shorten hanging in the breeze, unable to echo their sentiments but equally unable to take them to task for abandoning the Labor line. Asked by media this morning, Shorten was forced to clarify that he wouldn’t be adding his voice to those raised in urging the PM to #LetThemStay, which does make you wonder how little you could get away with opposing to retain the title ‘Opposition Leader’.

Presumably Shorten’s just playing the long game, waiting for precisely the right time to burst forth from his balding chrysalis as a fully-formed Opposition Leader ready to rip the government to bits over its treatment of some of humanity’s most vulnerable and traumatised people. either that or he’s just not very good. Coin-flip.