Before we start, let’s just clear away the cant of politicians wringing their hands claiming this is all about stopping deaths at sea. There is a very simple way to stop deaths at sea that curiously neither Labor, nor the Coalition, nor the Greens ever propose: simply send ships and planes to bring them safely over to Australia. Right. So at least we know that’s not what we’re talking about here. In reality the asylum seeker debate is an increasingly shame-faced debate about sovereignty. It’s the primary concern of the right, but also the governing left. Added to that, more on the left side, the asylum seeker debate is also how politicians have understood their growing detachment from their social base. This makes asylum seeker policy primarily a concern of our political class that tends to be projected onto the electorate, exaggerating its electoral importance. Laurie Ferguson, for example, was telling us a few weeks ago that boat arrivals were killing Labor in Sydney. So he must have been surprised when Rudd’s rebound was especially strong in Sydney on an issue he is seen to be weak on (but given that polls also show that, despite the best efforts of Labor and the Coalition, voters think Rudd is better than Abbott and Gillard at “making things happen”, maybe the public takes about as much notice of what politicians say as politicians do of what the public thinks). Because the asylum seeker debate is not about what it seems to be, Rudd’s announcement yesterday was more disruptive than its technicalities suggest. After all, in principle, there is not such an enormous difference between resettlement in Papua New Guinea, or being sent to the back of some undefined queue in Gillard’s Malaysian Solution or indefinite detention in Nauru under Howard (as a refugee you had a better chance of coming to Australia from Howard’s Nauru, but only because he couldn’t get enough other countries to take them at the time). Nor will it necessarily stop the boats, at least in the medium term. Yet Rudd’s announcement is disruptive because of the context in which it has been delivered, from what has happened since he returned to office, and what is likely to happen from now. A difficulty of following the current fast pace of change is that much of it is being driven by events that happened years ago. For example, the breakdown in Labor’s power structures that allowed the return of Rudd, and has been accelerating since, stems from the end of Labor’s historical project 20 years ago under Hawke and Keating. But things do not move in a straight line. At times the old order reasserts itself and progress, at least on the surface, appears to stand still. The Gillard years represented the party’s power bases reasserting themselves, dumping a first term Labor Prime Minister in a desperate attempt to regain control. Yet things carry on under the surface, the stasis is temporary and when it ends, suddenly change happens at the speed of a cavalry camel. This applies not only to the Australian political scene. Around the world, at the same time as Labor’s historic project (and hence the non-Labor’s project as well) was being wound down, parties of the left and right were undergoing upheaval coinciding with the end of the Cold War on the international stage. Politically, the biggest loser of the end of the Cold War, besides the Soviet Union, was the US. The threat of nuclear destruction was an ideal means for the US to assert global leadership as the world waited breathlessly for the result of each superpower summit. Since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 we have been seeing something unusual, a superpower whose political influence is declining faster than its economic dominance would suggest. But again not in a straight line. The War on Terror following 9/11 allowed the US to recover the leadership that drifted during the Clinton years. Yet the recovery was not permanent. Indeed the War on Terror, especially the war in Iraq, eventually just further exposed the US’s increasing isolation on the world stage and Obama was left to pull the US back and try to rebuild lost alliances and influence. The temporary revival of US authority from the War on Terror had a direct impact on Australian domestic politics. It turned what had been a leader of a flagging government into the Man of Steel who would beat Labor two more times. It also allowed Howard to turn around the issue that had been the clearest symbol of the loss of authority during the first five years of his government, boat arrivals. Howard’s assertion that “we will decide” a month after 9/11 was hubris backed up by a War on Terror that not only allowed Howard to turn it into a security issue, but to get the support of regional players, especially Indonesia, to cooperate to do something about it. It’s no coincidence then that during that other lurch back during the Gillard years, the asylum debate flowed directly from the Howard years as second time farce, culminating in politicians flocking to one side of the House to bring back Howard’s Pacific Solution to stop the boats when, of course, it did no such thing. Because, compared to Howard’s time, internationally things had kept moving on. Just how much has been revealed as Rudd breaks up the cosy Gillard-Abbott pas de deux, bringing in the new international reality that both sides have done their best to ignore. This new reality asserted itself on 31 May 2013 when, after months of Australia ignoring the message from Jakarta, it sent its representative to Australia to spell it out directly to the nation’s media. The intervention of the Indonesians has been like a shock to the political system. Despite the obvious blow it gave to the Coalition’s boat policy, Gillard Labor did nothing. Yet on his return, Rudd not only used it but deliberately escalated it at his first press conference by raising the possibility of military conflict to the howls of expert political commentators. Then, to rub it in, the Indonesian Foreign Minister was brought over to give the same message in several interviews on Australian media. The right’s response has been a mixture of confusion and outrage. The confusion was summed up by Morrison who, in the space of one day, leapt on the Foreign Minister’s remarks that he was open to talking to the Coalition as implying the possibility of agreement – before the Foreign Minister went to the next interview to make clear there wasn’t – after which Morrison said that it didn’t matter whether Indonesia agreed anyway. The outrage was best summed up by The Australian’s in-house rationalist Chris Kenny, who castigated Carr and the meeja for the disgraceful manipulation of the Foreign Minister in the second interview – as though he was a naiveté who had just stepped off the boat rather than a senior representative of a major Asian economy merely repeating what his government had been saying to deaf ears for months. Kenny thought it was disgraceful that Labor was using foreign leaders for blatant domestic purposes, clearly forgetting Bush’s intervention on Howard’s behalf against Latham in 2004, which, given that Kenny was on Downer’s staff at the time, is surprising. But then the US meddling in Australian affairs is different. Actually it is. The US has traditionally played a critical role in Australian politics. For a middling power, Australia has an unusual foreign policy. Australian diplomacy doesn’t really do regionalism, however it much it likes to pretend to. It rather relies on attaching itself very close to whatever is the leading global superpower of the day, so giving the political class an authority that home-grown institutions don’t quite bestow. Even when it goes into the region, Australia is inevitably seen by its Asian neighbours as America’s stooge, or “deputy sheriff”, as it is more politely known. The relationship with the US goes to the core of the political system and is inviolable. So Rudd’s bringing in of Asian neighbours into the Australian political debate is new and disruptive. But it is also not just one-way. Yesterday’s deal with Papua New Guinea also locks Australia intimately, and openly, into the prospects of a nearest neighbour, and a potentially unstable one at that. One reason PNG may now be more open to negotiation than it was with past entreaties from the Howard government is the current weakness of the state, to which Rudd has now hooked Australia politically and financially. The only response from here is to regionalise and internationalise the asylum seeker issue even further. Just as Rudd has shifted the economic debate to the Chinese slowdown, he continues as he did in his first stint with climate change: using international agendas to disrupt the domestic one. Except this time the Great Destabiliser has moved up a notch.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Jul 2013 13:58:56 +0000
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