Australian politics
AUKUS again
Two senior ministers in the UK Government – Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, are in Australia, to cement defence and trade ties, according to Patrick Wintour, writing in The Guardian.
Hervé Lemahieu, Director of Research at the Lowy Institute, provides some interpretation of this visit in a 10-minute interview on the ABC’s Breakfast program: Top UK ministers travel to Australia for major security talks. It is strange that they should send their senior ministers away to the other side of the planet at a time when the government is going through a leadership crisis, and when Russia is threatening to start a war in Europe – but perhaps the UK, which has never quite reoriented itself since it lost its empire, doesn’t really understand that it is part of Europe.
Lemahieu sees the visit partly as a means to “revitalize old relationships” (“disinter” may be a better term). In terms of the AUKUS deal it is about promoting UK submarine technology over US technology. (Can we be convinced to buy sophisticated defence equipment from a country that is long past its industrial and technological peak?)
More seriously, he sees the visit in terms of the UK re-establishing itself as a power in the Asian region, as a counter to China’s rising power. He says that “there is more than nostalgia at play”, but he may have missed the fact that in just two weeks we will be commemorating the 80th anniversary of the fall of Singapore in 1942, which saw the inglorious exit of the British Empire from our region. Lemahieu optimistically believes that the UK return to our region won’t upset the security relationships we have carefully cultivated over many decades – although the insipid slogan “building a network of liberty” won’t sell too well in most Asian countries.
Of all defence alignments we could make in relation to China, surely Britain would be one of the least appropriate and most likely to cause offence in China. As a world power the UK is in decline and has deliberately cut itself off from the rest of western Europe, which is building its defence capacity. Also the Chinese have long memories of the “century of humiliation” Britain imposed on China in the Opium Wars. These trade and defence deals seem to be far more in Britain’s interests than ours. Perhaps Morrison has allowed his sentimental attachment to Britain, an attachment shared by many in his party, to override our national interest.
One less for tennis
George Christiansen must be pleased that, through its ineptitude, the Morrison Government has elevated Novak Djokovic’s status as an anti-vaxxer. Writing in the Lowy Institute’s The Interpreter, Serbian journalist Nikola Mikovic draws our attention to Djovic’s anti-vax sentiment: Novak Djokovic – a symbol for anti-vaxxers?
The other main consequence of the affair is that in dismissing Djokovic’s application to overturn his visa cancellation the Federal Court has confirmed the “god-like” powers, unreviewable by the courts, the Migration Act has given to the minister. As Maria O’Sullivan writes in The Conversation, the minister’s case was weak, but that didn’t matter. Why Novak Djokovic lost his fight to stay in Australia – and why it sets a concerning precedent. O’Sullivan’s concerns are amplified in a short (4-minute) interview on the ABC Breakfast program, in which Sanmati Verma Clothier of Anderson immigration lawyers and member of the Visa Cancellation Working Group points out that these special discretionary powers, introduced in 2014 (just after the Coalition was elected), give the immigration minister more discretionary powers than are available to any minister in any other portfolio. The government has the capacity to use these powers to ban anyone with whom it disagrees, without any requirement for a strong justification. Also, that power gives the government the power to impose indefinite detention on refugees and asylum-seekers: Djokovic case raises immigration power concerns.
This case has commanded world-wide attention. In its article How the “Djokovic affair” finally came to an end, The New York Times quotes Ben Saul, of the University of Sydney:
The saga has exposed much long-running dysfunction and injustice in the Australian system: excessively strict byzantine and unpredictable entry rules, but paradoxically special treatment through exceptions for the rich and famous.
Australians, used to rocking up to many Asian, European and American countries and being waved through immigration, may be unaware of the stringency of our visa system. The repulsive “White Australia” policy may be behind us, but there is still a xenophobic “fortress Australia” attitude in our immigration and visitor policies.
While the Morrison government was clearly driven by its desire to burnish its “we will decide who comes into this country” credentials, it has also contributed, unintentionally, to moves in other countries to crack down on the unvaccinated, as explained by Yasmeen Serhan in The Atlantic. Even if the Morrison government was characteristically gauche and incompetent in the way it dealt with Djokovic, the decision to keep him out of the country was supported domestically and has been well-received by governments trying to get their populations vaccinated, particularly in France, which is trying to enforce strict vaccination mandates. The silent, vaccinated, impatient majority is tired of having their health care systems clogged and being inconvenienced by public health restrictions because of the selfishness of those who deliberately refuse to be vaccinated. (Don’t expect Morrison to claim credit for this contribution to the global good: he doesn’t want to jeopardize preference flows from Clive Palmer.)
Opinion polls are slowly re-awakening, and it’s bad news for the Coalition
William Bowe’s Poll Bludger reports on a Resolve Strategic poll, conducted in mid-January (Jan 12-15), revealing a collapse in support for the Coalition.
As has been the case with other polls, the Coalition’s loss is only partly picked up by Labor. The Coalition’s vote is 34 percent (41 percent in the 2019 election); Labor’s is 35 percent (33 percent in 2019). The Sydney Morning Herald has a website where the poll’s results can be disaggregated by gender, region and issue. Most tellingly there is a significant gender gap – women are far more likely to vote Labor or Green than men.
The same website has disaggregations for the three largest states, but they stretch the bounds of credibility. In Victoria Labor leads the Coalition by 40 percent to 29 percent, while in Queensland both main parties perform miserably (LNP 34 percent, Labor 26 percent), with Green support at 15 percent and One Nation at 13 percent.
A separate article in The Sydney Morning Herald has some analysis of the results. It draws attention to the 5 percent fall in the Coalition’s vote since the same poll was taken in November, but because of sampling errors one should be cautious when comparing two successive surveys.
More notable is that to date Resolve Strategic polls have shown a much higher support for the Coalition than other polls. Perhaps there has been a big fall in Coalition support since December – this would be credible in view of Morrison’s mismanagement of the Omicron outbreak. Or perhaps the results are at one end of Resolve Strategic’s error margin. Adrian Beaumont, writing in The Conversation, has some analysis of the Resolve Strategic poll and a comparison with other polls: Coalition slumps in first poll of 2022 as voters lose confidence in Morrison’s handling of pandemic. He is disappointed that Resolve Strategic’s methods do not allow for calculation of a two-party vote, but it would be a brave person who could do such a calculation in the present political environment.
Thoughts from Eureka Street writers
John Falzon and Barry Gittins both have articles in Eureka Street, expressing their wishes for 2022. Unsurprisingly there is a strong convergence in their desire that as the pandemic (hopefully) recedes, we can continue to value the primacy of the public sphere.
Falzon’s contribution All that is solid melts into air (with attribution to K Marx) starts by observing the fragmentation of many people’s working lives – those who are working in two or three jobs, in insecure and poorly-paid employment. “This precarity is not an accident of history. It is designed to place people in a position of assumed powerlessness. It functions most effectively for its instigators when people are isolated from each other, atomised, fragmented, convinced that their malady is theirs alone”, he writes. He makes a strong call to fix our social brokenness and to come together in solidarity, to build a stronger society.
Gittins’ contribution Our hopes and fears for 2022 mentions other forces causing stress and distress. The pandemic has seen a widening of inequality, and has inflicted loneliness and isolation on many, disproportionately among young people and women. Coming out of pandemic restrictions will generate other tensions: he hopes that we can meet the challenge of these conflicts with kindness and tolerance.
Both writers, in their own ways, ask us all to think of the society we want to live in as we make our political choices in the coming election.