Labor’s supporters have had a common response to anyone attacking its relatively modest and conservative approach to this election — if it, say, committed to raising the rate of JobSeeker, or proposed a more humane refugee policy, can you imagine how News Corp would react?
Well, we’ve had our first test of how that approach works.
After the election day release of information about a boat of Sri Lankan asylum seekers arriving off the coast of Western Australia, acting Prime Minister Richard Marles and Treasurer Jim Chalmers directed Border Force to continue with the boat turnback.
First, no one has any right to be be surprised by this: the ALP has been completely open about its support for the policy of boat turnbacks and has previously fought — without much success — to make asylum seeker arrivals via plane into an issue. It’s only Kristina Keneally’s loss in Fowler to independent Dai Le that spares us an emoji-laden tweet announcing the turnback.
And the release of information on election day concerning “on water matters” that had hitherto been ensconced in complete secrecy smacked of a desperate and transparent attempt to stir up fear over Labor’s record on boat arrivals. Labor has rightly announced an investigation, though asking Mike Pezzulo to investigate alleged political interference in his own department seems like sending the goat to investigate who ate all your cabbage.
So how did News Corp, which would have slaughtered Labor if it had a more humane approach, react? As well as you’d expect.
Over at Sky News, bellicose fact-dodger Paul Murray, presumably fresh from telling transphobe and failed Liberal candidate Katherine Deves some hee-larious anti-Labor jokes, interviewed Chris Kenny, who said Marles “taking credit” for the boat turnback was “insane” and “embarrassing” (and Kenny sure knows a lot about embarrassment).
Meanwhile, The Australian deciding that the enemy of its enemy is a friend, had the Greens on its front page calling the turnback “shameful”. The Herald Sun ran the Greens line too, under the headline “Albo under fire days into the top job”.
It may not be the hoarse catastrophising that would have followed anything other than a turnback, but it’s hardly ameliorated the News Corp stable’s inherent views on the Labor Party.
