No one wants to be lectured on humanity by politicians, let alone backers of porous borders whose compassion resulted in more than 1000 deaths at sea.
Conservative Party leader Cory Bernardi pointed to this hypocrisy during debate on Labor’s border-weakening medevac Bill last year.
An opinion piece in tiday’s the Australian says:
lNo one wants to hear about press freedom from the party whose leader sought to muzzle the media with a meta-regulator. Within weeks of losing an unlosable election, Labor is positioning itself as the moral authority on freedom despite a long record of undermining the foundations of liberal democracy.
Anthony Albanese says the Labor Party supports a secure border policy with “humanity”. He has defended the appointment of Kristina Keneally as opposition home affairs spokeswoman despite her history of criticising the pillars of border security policy.
Speaking to the ABC, Keneally said she now supported offshore processing and boat turnbacks “where safe to do so”. Like Albanese, she uses obscure qualifications without defining them. For example, she claims Labor is interested in “keeping people safe but also not losing our collective national soul, not losing our collective national conscience”.
There are obvious problems with Labor’s home affairs chief putting national security in the same category as “collective national soul”. The most obvious is that transcendental musings are not renowned for their power to stop terrorists, traffickers and people-smugglers at the border. But Labor has doubled down on soul-signalling over national security by begging the authority of Rome. Albanese attributed Keneally’s past criticism of secure border policy to her religion, saying it was a reflection of her Catholic faith.
It is increasingly common for the green-left to claim Christ-like virtue for policies that fail the test of reason. Sometimes they cite biblical passages out of context to bolster the case for weak Western borders.
When last in office, Labor dismantled the Howard government’s protection of national borders. Its virtue-signalling sent a green light to people-smugglers. The result of the ALP’s exercise in collective national conscience and humanity was the arrival of 50,000 asylum-seekers on 848 boats and an estimated 1160 deaths at sea. The ALP left a $16 billion bill for Australian taxpayers to clean up its mess.
If the Labor experiment with porous borders was a historical anomaly, the party might be in a position to advise the Coalition on national security. But from the opposition benches, Labor ensured the passage of legislation that compromised Australian borders. It rejected citizenship reform aimed at prioritising the national interest through strengthened vetting procedures.
Labor worked with the green-left to dismantle the pillars of Australian border security. It used children as political weapons to justify support for the medevac bill that effectively transferred authority over who can enter the country from the government elected by the people to unelected medics.
Labor MPs used the plight of children to make their case for the medevac bill despite its border policy having resulted in 8000 children being held in detention.
Labor’s record of governing against the national interest goes well beyond border security. When last in office, it prepared laws to gag freedom of speech and the free press.
It was amusing to watch Albanese cry freedom this week given his central role in agitating for a media meta-regulator under the Gillard government. The 2012 Finkelstein inquiry, stacked with left-wing advisers, came up with the stunning idea to regulate the free press.
