We have to talk about Dutton

Peter Dutton - the Brussels Sprouts of Australian politics

Aside from Peter Dutton’s personality, his disloyalty, his resemblance to common vegetables and his propensity to say unbelievably stupid things when presented with a microphone, there is another problem facing him during this election campaign. He cannot defend his record, nor his government’s record on asylum seeker, refugee and immigration policy. Not because it’s bad, although it is; the problem is that for almost three years, there has been a deliberate absence of information about one topic: stopping the boats. 

And when there’s no credible information, the vacuum sucks in anything and everything, filling with void with a mishmash of nonsense that would make the boys on Mythbusters cry. Who knows what the hell is going on inside the Department of Immigration and Border Protection? 

From the earliest days of the Abbott Government, we learned that the Minister – Scott Morrison at the time – would not discuss “on water operations”. It’s meaning was a little broader than that; there would be no discussion of asylum seeker boats approaching Australia, leaving Australia, landing in Australia, breaking up, breaking down, being boarded, being evacuated, being towed, being torpedoed…if it involved a boat that might have asylum seekers in it, expect it to be classified. The weekly press conferences with Scott Morrison and LTGEN Angus Campbell, now Chief of Army, were precise to the point of farce. We were told, via those weekly press conferences, exactly what the Government wanted us to know, and no more. “On water matters” became a cynical catchphrase for anything mysterious, secretive or hidden.

So while Scott Morrison was busily not talking about on water matters, and the Murdoch tabloids were trumpeting Prime Minister Abbott’s success at stopping the boats, the Guardian was reporting that representatives from the UNHCR had released a report that suggested that boats were still leaving and people were still dying. They can't both be right. 

According to the UNHCR report on Irregular Maritime Movements in South-East Asia, over 50,000 people set sail just from the Bay of Bengal area in January-November 2014. The smugglers operating in the region move people who are trafficked as well as those paying for passage outside of legal migration channels.

The only avenue left to Minister Dutton is literally the party line – that the boats have stopped and everything is honky-dory. We know it's not because people have set themselves on fire.

Unfortunately for the Turnbull team, Mr Dutton has about as much credibility left as those vegetables he's often compared to. This ex-cop has perfected the art of shoving of both of his feet in his mouth at the same time, while continuing to talk nonsense. Into a live microphone.

In his latest headline-making gaffe, he suggested that asylum seekers and refugees are likely to be illiterate and innumerate. It’s worst-case-scenario cultural stereotyping, it's unforgivable ignorance…or in smaller words, it’s just plain wrong. Some, like the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, have stood behind their self-embattling Minister for Avoidable Gaffes. Most have not. It’s never easy to defend the indefensible.

The good people of Dickson, Mr Dutton’s electorate, would do well to remember that his gaffes are not one-offs, nor are they always accidental. Consider these classics from his greatest hits album:

• ·      He was the only Coalition front bencher not present during Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations.
• ·      He was unhappy about a redistribution which made his seat less safely Liberal, so he tried for pre-selection in a neighbouring seat, and lost. He had to return to Dickson, tale between his legs, and hope Dickson was desperate enough to have him back.
• ·      During the Gillard-Rudd parliament, he was Shadow Minister for Health and Ageing, yet infamously asked only one question about health during that time.
• ·      He was appointed Minister for Health during the Abbott Government, and was subsequently named Worst Health Minister of the past 35 years in a poll run by a trade magazine for doctors.
• ·      He was caught by an open mic, making jokes about climate change and how it will effect low lying Pacific islands.
• ·      In response to an unflattering article by Samantha Maiden about former minister Jamie Briggs, Dutton wrote a text of support to Briggs, in which he described Ms Maiden as “a mad fucking witch”. He then sent the text to Ms Maiden instead.
• ·      He denied that Greens Senator Sarah Hanson Young was spied upon while on Nauru – a claim which was contradicted by his own department, as well as Wilson Security, the company which had done the spying.
• ·      He described refugees as “illiterate and innumerate” and suggested that would be unemployable, clogging unemployment queues while simultaneously taking jobs meant for real Australians. 

And that’s without the “creepy internet meme” fiasco, which wasn’t really his fault at all – blame someone in his crack media team.  

I wonder if it’s the same media team that brought us “on water operations.”

HOAX ALERT - Part 2 (Anyhow...have a Winfield)

Just two months or so after his recent nontroversy about Cadbury removing the word Easter from its seasonal chocolate eggs (they hadn’t), Senator Glenn Lazarus has been caught out again, embroidering some Murdochrian “truth” and failing to check the facts before posting his outrage on his Facebook page. This time, it's a new variant of that old chestnut about refugees receiving all manner of luxurious benefits.

The insinuation is that if we didn’t give the cursed asylum seekers so much extravagance, we’d be able to afford to look after our veterans and pensioners.

His Facebook post from this afternoon has the following to say:

Why are asylum seekers on Manus Island being treated like kings and being given free cigarettes and other perks at the expense of Australian taxpayers when we have Australian veterans who have fought for our country living on the streets, families who are struggling to live week to week and pensioners who have worked all their life and paid tax and can not afford to buy bread and milk.

The RUBBISH needs to STOP!

I have had enough of the major parties. We desperately need politicians who are prepared to put Australians and our country first.

But it’s true, I hear you scream from all four corners of your flat earth. It says so in the email!

Ahh yes. Let’s deal with the email. This one has been around so long that the government had to post an entire debunking on their own website. The Gillard Government, that is, in 2012. 

So infamous is this email that it’s been also been debunked by Hoax Slayer, snopes.com, the Refugee Council, Wikipedia, the Australian Government, CPSU, Sunrise host David Koch, and me. I’m not even going to link to each of these articles; they are summarised quite well on the APH website.

As for the Senator’s claims today about detainees on Manus using their taxpayer funded ciggies to barter for alcohol and drugs, we know exactly where that came from. Enter the News Corp tabloids. Late last night, the Herald Sun published an article by Peter Michael, under the cracking headline, “Manus Island asylum seekers trading taxpayer-funded cigarettes for booze, marijuana”.  Other News Corp titles picked up the piece not long after.

And what a cracking piece of journalism it is. The article, peppered with emotive yet vaguely inaccurate terms like “illegal” and “sources”, tells us that Aussie taxpayers are supplying detainees with packets of cigarettes as a reward for good behaviour. And that's accurate - we are. 

Before going gazebo all over our Facebook pages, let’s introduce some perspective.

Two years ago, the cost to accommodate, feed and guard one asylum seeker detained on Manus Island for one year was around $400,000, or $1095 per day. Add a pack a day of Winfield Blue 25s at $26.25 per pack (that’s RRP – the government would be paying far less) and the cost balloons out by quite a bit less than $10,000 per year, or less than $9 million across the facility.  The truth is that Australia would save money if we abandoned the cruel offshore detention policy and place asylum seekers - with their cigarettes - in community detention. 

Closing Manus Island now, and bringing the 900 asylum seekers into Australian detention centres would immediately save the government more than $150 million dollars per year on running costs alone. Community detention is even less expensive, and tends to result in more positive human outcomes. The savings at the one-year mark for the population of Manus Island Offshore Detention Centre would be well over a quarter of a billion dollars. Sadly, that's only about an extra $100 per year to each of our aged pensioners. 

Senator Lazarus's fretting about a cigarette allowance as though it would make any practical difference to the living standards of veterans and pensioners is disingenuous.

Manus Island Detainees living like kings.

But what of the rest of Senator Lazarus’s rant? The compound on Manus Island bears no resemblance to the palace the Senator seems to think exists, in which a safe and luxurious lifestyle is provided at the expense of the wellbeing of honest, hardworking Aussies. It’s a stinking hot, humid cesspit, with a history that smells as much of desperation as it does of sweat. 

That there is anything luxurious for these men on Manus Island is a fabrication of the Senator’s own making. If we take away their cigarette ration, which many of them don’t seem to want anyway, the maximum annual saving would be in the well short of ten million dollars – hardly more than Bronwyn Bishop’s helicopter and limousine budget.

Senator Lazarus is right about one thing, though: this rubbish needs to stop. The Papua New Guinean Government might love the money Australia pays them to keep a few hundred unwanted men in a prison on one of their islands, but there is no love, little compassion and only unwilling tolerance of the men imprisoned there. There is simply no sane reason to keep Manus Island and Nauru Offshore Processing Centres operating. 

This merciless policy diminishes all of us.

Additional Reading: Penny wise, pound foolish: how to really save money on refugees