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“Fate Keeps On Happening”: Australia, Boat People, And The Repressed
Immigration Issue

By R. J. Stove

" Australia’s leftish Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has displayed a fairly formidable range of literary awareness, running the gamut from free market economist F. A. Hayek (whom he resents) to theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (whom he reveres). This daunting curriculum, though, appears never to have included Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

A pity. Because Rudd’s current political plight calls to mind the
maxim of that novel’s intrepid but pragmatic heroine Lorelei Lee:
"Fate Keeps On Happening".

The "fate" in question is the 2001 national election, which should
have been a disaster for conservative John Howard, head of Australia’s
government since 1996. Opinion polls for most of 2001 had Howard well
behind.

Then two things happened to save Howard’s career. Most spectacularly,
9/11 helped frighten the electorate into having doubts about the
advisability of changing horses in mid-stream. But even before that,
in August 2001, there was the MV Tampa affair.

The MV Tampa was a Norwegian cargo ship carrying more than 430 (exact
numbers are variously given) Third World asylum seekers, mostly
Afghans. Howard—fearful of an anti-immigration backlash led by Pauline
Hanson, then at the height of her fame—refused to permit the Tampa to
enter Australian waters.

This decision, of course, inspired profuse moaning from the
commentariat, international as well as local, about Howard’s
"xenophobia”. Such moaning increased in its intensity when he
proclaimed: "We will decide who comes to this country, and the
circumstances in which they come."

On Election Day, the opposition didn’t have a prayer. Howard returned
to office with an increased majority, the first of his country’s Prime
Ministers to manage this feat since Harold Holt in 1966.

No adult Australian, least of all in Rudd’s Labor Party, has forgotten
the humiliation of this defeat. It has burnt its way into Labor’s
collective soul, in a way that other, still more severe Labor losses
(such as Gough Whitlam’s landslide routs in 1975 and 1977) failed to
do.

Consequently immigration hardly figured in the 2004 election campaign.
Labor’s leader that year, Mark Latham, was spectacularly erratic in
many respects. But on a few themes he possessed a certain native horse
sense. He compelled his party to accept a policy of increased
penalties for people-smugglers and for those who overstayed temporary
visas. No way was Latham about to tolerate accusations by Howard of
being soft on illegals.

Suitably impressed by the resultant bipartisan front against illegals
getting special privileges, most people-smugglers ceased attempting to
ply their noisome trade in Australia’s vicinity.

Until now.

In 2009, an exclamation by the late Heather O’Rourke in Poltergeist II
is newly appropriate to describe the advance of boat people: "They’re
baaack!"

On April 16, a fishing boat containing Afghan illegals caught fire,
killing five people—not three, as originally reported—and injuring 40
more, many of whom were taken to Royal Perth Hospital. (For footage of
the fire, see here.)

In the aftermath of this tragedy, the Rudd Government has been left
looking much more rattled than at any time since it stormed to victory
at the 2007 election. (At that election, it had deprived Howard not
only of the Prime Ministry but of his own parliamentary seat in
Sydney. Not coincidentally, Howard had not raised the immigration
issue again.

The post-Howard "conservative" Liberal Party opposition, led by
Malcolm Turnbull—a prize instance of the pseudo-Catholic pro-abort pol
with whom Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and John Kerry have made Americans
depressingly familiar—has the scent of blood in its nostrils, for the
first time since 2007. Turnbull is accusing Rudd and his cabinet
ministers of covering up information about the explosion and its
aftermath.

"They know full well what’s happened", Turnbull insists. "They’ve
known for some time. They should tell the truth. That’s all we’re
asking them to do." [Rudd Braces For More Boat People, By David
McLennan, The Canberra Times, April 21, 2009]

Turnbull’s critique is purely technical, however. He has specifically
repudiated the Howard era’s border protection policies, which alone,
if re-established, might have some chance of restoring the situation
to the 2001-2007 status quo. In essence, he is emulating John McCain’s
shunning of the issue that hurt McCain so badly with the Republican
base.

This is a problem, because while no-one in authority will confirm as
yet whether the explosion occurred deliberately or accidentally, what
remains indisputable is Prime Minister Rudd’s personal anger at people-
smugglers.

Such anger makes a conspicuous contrast with his usual public persona
(periodically likened to Harry Potter) of cherubic blandness. But he
recently called people-smugglers "the vilest form of human life" and
hoped that they would "rot in hell".

Whereas in 2001 it was Labor which found itself trapped in a "damned
if it does, damned if it doesn’t" vise apropos illegals, now this
unenviable victim status is firmly maintained by Turnbull’s Liberal-
National coalition. Turnbull’s natural aggression means that he cannot
be seen to agree with Rudd’s policies regarding the illegals, or
anything else. This aggression has made him publicly hated without
being even remotely respected, a fatal combination in politics, as
Machiavelli long ago explained.

Meanwhile, opinion polls (carried out, admittedly, before April 16)
had Rudd coasting along on a 74 per cent popularity rating. Those who
preferred to see Turnbull take over from Rudd as Prime Minister
constituted a grand total of 24 per cent.

The same polls found that the usual mid-term blues had simply failed
to occur. Rudd’s own party has been not just unscathed but, rather,
strengthened. Labor led the Liberal-National coalition by 58 per cent
to 42 per cent. That was actually six points better than the result
with which it won office two years ago. (A subsequent poll, reported
on May 4, showed a slight decline in Rudd’s popularity. Still, 64 per
cent of respondents continued to prefer Rudd over Turnbull.)

So on present trends, Rudd is unlikely to lose the next election, due
no later than 2010. Besides, incumbency gives a much greater advantage
to first-term Australian Prime Ministers than it does to first-term
American Presidents.

To find an Australian national leader who lost office after a single
term, à la Jimmy Carter or George H. W. Bush, we must go back to the
hapless James Scullin, flung out of the Prime Ministry in 1931, during
the Great Depression’s depths. (For newsreel footage of Scullin, see
here.) Even Whitlam, chaotic administrator though he was, secured for
himself a second term, in 1974.

If the boat people issue continues for long enough to do Rudd serious
damage, Australia’s conservatives might have a chance at winning
power. Or, who knows, they might even raise the issue of legal
immigration, effectively kept out of politics by the usual bipartisan
consensus since Hanson’s implosion.

But probably, like the GOP in the U.S., they will opt to play the
political game in the approved way—and lose."

R. J. Stove [send him mail] lives in Melbourne, Australia.

http://www.vdare.com/stove/090527_australia.htm