quote: J Albrechtsen The Australian
What is it about Kristina Keneally? She can’t resist a camera. If her efforts landed blows on the Coalition government, she would deserve kudos as a political up-and-comer. But just about each time the NSW senator attracts headlines, she helps the conservative cause.
At the weekend, the senator fronted a rally to demand the Morrison government allow a Tamil family to stay in Australia. Keneally is shadow home affairs minister and if she continues on this trajectory, her interventions will keep Labor in the political shadowlands.
The senator sided with Greens leader Richard Di Natale and other activists in their last-ditch attempt to force the government to allow Priya and Nadesalingam and their two children to be settled here, despite every legal decision going against their claim to be refugees in fear of political persecution.
If this campaign was genuinely about this one family, it would have been done quietly. Lawyers know that is how ministerial discretion is exercised, so as not to fuel the people-smugglers business. Yet Keneally joined a group of activists using this Sri Lankan family for their own political purpose: to challenge and then dismantle Australia’s border protection policies.
The party’s most attention-seeking woman is exposing Labor’s biggest political deficiency; a party still with doubts over over sound border protection policy. On Sunday, Keneally sounded like Kevin Rudd on steroids, a scary image to digest over breakfast. “Open your heart, understand what the gospel tells us as Christians to do,” Keneally said at the protest. “It is the Parable of the Good Samaritan where we welcome in our land the stranger, where we treat them with compassion and kindness.”
Thinking this a political winner, the senator repeated it on radio on Tuesday morning.
In October 2006, Rudd paraded his Christian morals writing in The Monthly that asylum-seekers were “another great challenge of our age”. Citing the “biblical injunction to care for the stranger” and “the Parable of the Good Samaritan”, Rudd denounced the Howard government’s Pacific solution as a “cause of great ethical concern to all the Christian churches”.
For cluelessness in politics, Keneally channelling Rudd is right up there. Voters haven’t forgotten Rudd’s invocation of the Good Samaritan came right before Labor oversaw the biggest policy failure this country has seen. Where was Labor’s compassion for strangers when its policy change led to 1200 deaths at sea, and more than 50,000 unlawful boat arrivals — the Sri Lankan mother and father among them? We don’t need sermons from our politicians, we need sound policy. Keneally must know her grandstanding efforts are a necessary part of the people-smugglers’ strategy to keep selling false dreams to asylum-seekers.
Where is the compassion if more Sri Lankans die on dangerous journeys? As reported by The Australian on Monday, the Morrison government has halted six attempted people-smuggling ventures since May. Most recently a boat carrying 13 suspected illegal immigrants was intercepted by Australian Border Force personnel on August 7.
How compassionate is it for Keneally, a front-row participant in this campaign, to offer false hope to a desperate family for ulterior political purposes?
In a sign that this misguided campaign has gone too far, even the ABC decided to present both sides to this sad story. On Monday, ABC’s AM program interviewed Simon Jeans, an immigration lawyer for more than 30 years, who said watching this case unfold over the past 18 months was akin to a watching a “train wreck in slow motion” where economic refugees have inflated their case for refugee protection, and been rejected time and again.
The father claimed refugee status as someone associated with the Tamil Tigers, yet has travelled frequently between Sri Lanka, Kuwait and Qatar between 2004 and 2010 for work, a period overlapping with the civil war that ended in 2009. Anyone associated with the Tamil Tigers would have been picked up by security forces, Jeans said.
While the family may have a meritorious case for ministerial discretion, if he grants a visa after a “virulent” campaign, Jeans said “it just encourages more people to make media campaigns and might be unfair for other people who may not be able to make as much noise in the community”.
Where is the compassion if this frenzied show trial of emotion by Keneally and others crushes the chances of this family to stay? Other families seeking ministerial discretion must be praying for activists and headline-chasing politicians to stay away from them so that their circumstances might be considered quietly, rather than as part of a campaign to change border protection policies.
The hysterical antics of activists, including Keneally and Di Natale, threaten an immigration system based on the rule of law. As Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has made clear, every detail of this family’s complex case for refugee status has been closely scrutinised. They have had their case heard by the Federal Magistrates Court, the Federal Court and the High Court. Decision-makers and judges at every level have rejected their claims.
Compassion is remembering that those people seeking to come here under our Special Humanitarian program face some of the world’s most shocking situations. When previous Labor governments relinquished control of our borders, they also lost control of our capacity to help this most vulnerable group.
With UN figures estimating 68 million asylum-seekers, the most compassionate policy builds community support for increased immigration. Under the Coalition, Australia has one of the largest per-capita refugee and humanitarian programs, second only to Canada. Our annual intake of 18,750 is more than at any time in 30 years. It could be higher still, provided we maintain community support by controlling our borders.
Under direction from Dutton, departmental officials and Australian military personnel have searched for desperately vulnerable women and children taken into captivity by Islamic State, and resettled 4000 Yazidis in Australia since July 2015.
That is compassion.
The dilemma for Labor is that the contrast between Keneally’s blowhorn politics and Dutton’s reasoned policy settings keeps getting sharper the longer Keneally stays in this role. And every time the senator chases a camera, voters are also invited to recall her political history.
In 2011, she led the NSW Labor government to the party’s biggest election defeat in history in a swing of more than 16 per cent. Not her fault, to be sure, but she chose to front a party rotting from the inside. She failed to win Bennelong from John Alexander in 2017. She secured a Senate seat through a casual vacancy after Sam Dastyari resigned in disgrace in February last year.
She was selected Senate deputy leader this year only after Don Farrell relinquished the position to satisfy Labor’s obsession with gender quotas.
If Keneally is what you get when a political party adheres to quotas, the Coalition had better hope Labor keeps delivering more of the same. Keneally gets full marks for chutzpah, but that same quality makes her the gift that keeps on giving for the Coalition.
COLUMNIST
Janet Albrechtsen is an opinion columnist with The Australian. She has worked as a solicitor in commercial law, and attained a Doctorate of Juridical Studies from the University of Sydney. She has written for n...
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