Malcolm’s election campaign under water

Mungo MacCallum

So Malcolm Turnbull’s $50 billion submarines sank almost without trace – not as they were meant to, after the first of them makes its stealthy launch in 2030, or somewhere within that decade, but in a morass of turmoil and distraction last week—not the ideal fanfare for a lengthy campaign in which they will be utterly overwhelmed by more urgent and pressing issues among the long-suffering public.

The decision on the subs was, of course, a huge win for the French: at enormous expense (to us) they will remove the nuclear engines from their prototypes and replace them with diesel engines – or coal, or wood, or cow dung – whatever fuel will satisfy the political sensitivities of Australians.

Regrettably, as the subs are finally commissioned in the 2030s or thereabouts they will be little more than reminders of a bygone era, but the point is that they will be largely built in Australia – in South Australia, where the eager tradesmen or their descendants are eager to labour in the shipyards of Adelaide until they perfect the overpriced and outdated artefacts.

A triumph of innovation from our agile prime minister – or it was supposed to be, until events intervened. First there was that pesky Bill Shorten. Just as the scare campaign about the annihilation of housing prices and the desolation of investment was being put in place, along he came with an emissions trading scheme – two of them in fact, two separate and complete carbon prices to attack.

It might be confusing, but time for a new scare campaign – or perhaps a reprise of an old one. After the collapse of Arrium steel, another Whyalla wipeout warning might be considered poor taste, but we could always heat up the $100 lamb roast…

But then came the big one: the supreme court of Papua New Guinea declared that the Manus Island detention centre was illegal, and always had been: the country’s constitution had been breached by withholding from its inhabitants their right to personal liberty. No ifs and buts, no loopholes: some device like the fiction in Nauru, that because the detainees were allowed out of the compound their liberty was not constrained, would not work. And the prime minister, Peter O’Neill, accepted immediately that the detention centre would be closed forthwith.

The impartial judgement of the Papua-New Guinea judiciary has not only exposed the hypocrisy of Manus Island; it has revealed that the whole carefully constructed impartial brutality of offshore detention is a fraud and a fiasco.

The court’s finding should not have been a surprise; the hearings began in 2013, shortly after the Abbott government signed a memorandum of understanding setting up the centre. Lawyers warned then that the agreement was unconstitutional and the result had been widely anticipated.

But not, it appears, by the present government. Turnbull’s initial response was: ‘I can’t provide a definitive road map from here,’ which was pollie-speak for: ‘I’m buggered if I know what we will do.’ Peter (Two Planks) Dutton said that the decision might be binding on Papua-New Guinea, but it wasn’t binding on Australia; he had apparently never heard Julie Bishop warning repeatedly that Australians abroad had to adhere to the law of the countries in which they travelled.

The point is that the centres and everyone in them are, as O’Neil delicately put it, on Manus Island at the request of the Australian government. The hard fact is that millions of dollars have been poured into Papua New Guinea to put the asylum seekers out of sight and out of mind; one estimate was that it cost $400,000 per inmate per year.

It may now be necessary to throw in a few hundred million more to arrange an orderly exit; for, in spite of Dutton’s jingoistic bluster, exit there will have to be. O’Neill already said that the centre ‘has done a lot more damage than probably anything else;’ now, with an election of his own to fight, he wants it gone, and gone soon.

So where are the 905 asylum seekers to go? About half of them have been dubbed genuine refugees and most of the rest are still to be processed. But none of them want to settle on Manus, or anywhere else in Papua-New Guinea; three who tried actually attempted to get back in the detention centre, claiming it was safer there than in the community. And of course there was one fatality; Reza Barati was murdered even inside the centre.

They could go to another country – if there was one available or allowed; New Zealand has said it is willing to resettle more than a few, but Turnbull has turned the generous offer down: it would, he cautioned, be far too pleasant – he needed the asylum seekers to suffer in order to deter the dreaded people smugglers.

Of course there is always Cambodia; after much ballyhoo five intrepid volunteers took the offer, and four of them were so appalled that they went home to the countries from which they had originally fled. Just one desperado remained, at the privileged price of $400 million. There have been desultory attempts to find other destinations, but so far no takers, however extravagant the bribes.

Allowing them to set foot on the Australian mainland is, of course, totally out of the question So we are back to packing them all into Nauru – where one resident has just burnt himself to death rather than remain there – or sending them to Christmas Island; but that is part of Australia, although, absurdly, it has been excised from the migration zone. So there is the risk that armadas of smugglers’ boats will rampage across the Indian Ocean, drowning thousands as the valiant forces of Sovereign Borders attempt to repel their leaky vessels from our fragile shores.

The impartial judgement of the Papua-New Guinea judiciary has not only exposed the hypocrisy of Manus Island; it has revealed that the whole carefully constructed impartial brutality of offshore detention is a fraud and a fiasco. So bad luck Malcolm Turnbull, bad luck Peter Dutton. Bad luck Bill Shorten, bad luck Richard Marles.

Oh, and a pity about the subs.