morrison’s boat theatrics backfire

Looks like the clowns are in charge!

"Morrison’s boat theatrics backfire and the stage show is over"

Prime Minister Tony Abbott told the West Australian Liberals on Saturday that all his colleagues appreciated the difference “between opposition, which is mostly theatre, and government, which is all substance”.

Perhaps not all of them. We’ve now endured eight low-farce, quasi-militaristic press conferences with Immigration Minister Scott Morrison and his variously starred generals about border protection.

The mission? To say as little as possible about what the government is doing on border protection but sound as tough as possible.

The reality is that when Kevin Rudd, as returned prime minister, outflanked the Coalition on the far right on asylum-seekers, he robbed the new government of the chance to claim a huge material difference in boat arrival numbers, since the tough line on people arriving by boat “never” being settled in Australia had started to have an impact on numbers, even during the election campaign.

The Coalition has opted for theatrics since then to try to create some product differentiation, and just perhaps to give it some cover for the inevitable time when ambitious claims made in opposition – such as “we will turn back the boats” – proved to be impossible to implement.

Unfortunately for Morrison and the government, Jakarta – irritated by the amateur theatrics and sensing an opportunity caused by accusations of spying – has decided to play a bit rough.

In an ocean standoff on Friday, it was the Australians who blinked first and agreed to take a group of asylum-seekers to Christmas Island, facing an Indonesian refusal to take them back.

What is much more troubling for Morrison, the government and the relationship between the two countries is that there are now conflicting versions of what has happened in past standoffs.

In a statement on Saturday, Morrison said that “on two recent occasions, Indonesia has agreed to [requests to transfer the passengers rescued to Indonesia] and facilitated an on-water transfer”.

But a Jakarta Post report issued just an hour earlier quoted a senior government spokesman saying that “out of six asylum-seeker boats rescued by Australian vessels recently, Indonesia declined to receive the last three requests for transfer, which happened between September and November”.

Now it is possible no one is lying here. But someone seems to have been, at the very least, misleading about what has been going on.

Having smugly tried to keep the lid on all information about what is happening to asylum-seekers, the tactic has backfired badly on Morrison since, for “operational reasons”, he is constrained in what he can say in response to the accounts coming from Jakarta.

There is also another difference between opposition and government, of course. It is called being accountable to the public.

http://www.afr.com/p/national/politics/morrison_boat_theatrics_backfire_ZycQZsEOzdapeNjFHdVwCI