sums up the alp. People have short memories with the whole bikie fiasco. Im sure it did more good than harm, despite our dusty bias.
https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/there-won-t-be-a-reshuffle-until-there-is-one-20240529-p5jhljIn July 2008, about seven months after the Rudd Labor government was elected, a parliamentary committee visited what was then the recently constructed detention centre on Christmas Island.
Committee chair and Labor MP Michael Danby was agog at what he believed to be a waste of $396 million on an empty, 800-bed facility which he likened to a prisoner of war camp.
“I think all of us from the delegation are frankly flabbergasted about the enormous expenditure of public money by the previous government on this,” Danby said.
“It just looks like an enormous white elephant.”
Talk about famous last words.
Less than a year-and-a-half later, in November 2009, the centre, bursting with almost 1000 detainees, was being torn apart during what was the first in a series of destructive riots that would occur over the next few years.
A brawl had erupted between 200 Afghan and Sri Lankan detainees in which more than 40 people, including five staff, were injured.
On the same day, a boat carrying 58 people, including two crew, was intercepted 100 nautical miles north-west of Derby, Western Australia. It was the 45th boat to reach Australian waters that year.
Three months later, in February 2010, the Rudd government announced it would increase the capacity of the detention centre by another 2300 places. And on it went.
The trigger for this catastrophe? The decision by Rudd and his ministers, upon coming into government to abolish the Howard government’s Pacific solution which had successfully ended the surge in people smuggling in the early 2000s, and then enabled that government to preside over an orderly immigration policy.
When Labor under Anthony Albanese ousted the Morrison Coalition government in 2022, it said the lesson from 2007 had been learned. There would be no tinkering or otherwise with immigration policy.
Yet, it could not help pulling at one little thread. It succumbed to demands by New Zealand for Australia to stop revoking the visas and forcibly repatriating Kiwi citizens who had committed serious crimes in Australia.
There is no comparison in scale with Rudd abolishing the Pacific solution, but the politics are still potent.
The issue had become the most serious irritant in the trans-Tasman relationship and the Kiwis had a point.
In some cases, people who had come to Australia as babies or kids, who had no family or other ties with their country of birth, and who had learned to be criminals in Australia, were being dumped on New Zealand’s doorstep.
Scott Morrison refused to yield and absorbed all the anger his NZ labour counterpart Jacinda Ardern threw at him.
To this day, Peter Dutton, who was immigration minister at the height of the deportations, requires an around-the-clock, close personal security detail because of death threats stemming from the bikies he deported.
Albanese wanted to show he was not Morrison and would rebuild the bridge across The Ditch. He promised Ardern to stop automatically repatriating every New Zealand citizen and apply a degree of common sense.
To give effect to this, Immigration Minister Andrew Giles, in January last year, issued Ministerial Direction 99, under which the strength and nature of an offender’s ties to Australia must be considered when weighing up whether to cancel their visa, as well as risk to community safety and whether their crime involved family violence.
This applied to all non-citizens, not just New Zealanders.
Citing Direction 99, the AAT subsequently, in dozens of cases, overturned decisions to cancel visas, allowing rapists, paedophiles and domestic violence offenders to stay in Australia and, in many cases, reoffend.Community safety
And this week, with the resumption of parliament, it became the latest immigration catastrophe to befall Giles and the government, as example after example of hideous acts perpetrated by people who otherwise should not be in Australia, were detailed with sombre glee by the opposition.
Finally, Giles announced Direction 99 was being rewritten to – lo and behold – give greater weight to common sense and community safety, raising fears in Wellington that deportations were about to begin again.
There is no comparison in scale with Rudd abolishing the Pacific solution, but the politics are still potent. Ardern, who quit after leaving her nation’s economy and her party’s political fortunes in smoking ruins, also bequeathed Albanese a stink bomb.
Not only has the latest ruckus put to the sword any prospect the government had left of trying to sell the virtues of its budget, but it has raised pressure on Albanese to reshuffle his frontbench, if only to shift Giles, who has struggled ever since last year’s High Court decision forced the release of more than 150 immigration detainees of dubious or criminal character.
Albanese has shown no sign of wanting to reshuffle and nothing is imminent. To move Giles, a close factional ally and member of his praetorian guard, could cause more problems than it would solve.
First, it would be regarded by his foes as an admission of culpability in that the deal with Ardern was flawed and second, who else would he move and why?
Most of the ministry is performing well and, as Albanese told the ANU’s Democracy Sausage podcast last week, having an unchanged ministry for the past two years has been an important show of stability.
More so, when contrasted with the political instability of the past decade and a half which resulted in so many ministerial reshuffles that there could have been a conveyor built between Parliament House and Yarralumla.
Reshuffles are like surgery in that the risk is pretty much all downside. Best avoided. As Tony Abbott used to say, those demoted or overlooked often become enemies and those who were promoted never thank you.
But that’s not to say Albanese doesn’t need to shake things up, either over winter or before Christmas, to give his team a fresh face for a second term and give a nod to the ambitious.
There is always a need to renew, but a reshuffle requires a trigger such as one or two existing ministers announcing they won’t be recontesting. That hasn’t happened yet.
Or, if the immigration portfolio continues to drag down the government. At the end of the day, Albanese, not Giles, is the opposition’s real target and the fortunes of the government are more important than those of the individual
If Giles has to be thrown to the wolves or shifted sideways as a circuit breaker, then so shall it be.
