Katharine Murphy theguardian.com, Monday 23 September 2013
Immigration minister Scott Morrison has defended its vow of silence on asylum seeker boat arrivals, audaciously reframing the government's refugees narrative in the process
Lieutenant General Angus Campbell, commander of the federal government's Operation Sovereign Borders policy, speaks at a press conference in Sydney on September 23, 2013. Photograph: William West/AFP/Getty
John Howard famously declared that his government would decide who comes here and the circumstances in which they come.
Immigration minister Scott Morrison has moved the old Howardism decisively into our more post modern age. Now the prevailing philosophical mantra is “we’ll decide what we tell you about the people who come here, and provide selected highlights of the circumstances in which they come.”
Scott Morrison calls this judicious sharing of information the operational and tactical requirements of Operation Sovereign Borders, the military-led plan to stop boats carrying asylum seekers.
Perhaps he actually believes that.
The rest of us can call it contempt – a contempt that stems from Morrison’s unshakeable confidence that the Coalition always wins the politics of this issue, regardless of the facts, regardless of the nit-pickers (go on hand-wringers, ululate about the enduring morality of transparency. Make my day).
Morrison wants to control not only the tempo of boat arrivals, he wants to control the tempo of reporting on boat arrivals. He managed the latter brilliantly in opposition. Now he wants to preserve his conductor’s baton in government – and shift the notation from allegro to legato. Allegro benefits you in opposition, but it kills you in government.
Morrison, having benefitted from elevating this issue every day in opposition, having successfully made asylum a proxy measure for whether you can govern effectively or not, now needs to tamp it right down lest the same existential test be applied to him.
Monday established the terms of the new arrangements. There will be briefings once a week. We’ll tell you precisely what we think we need to tell you. We will not commit to telling you whether we turn boats back to Indonesia. We might, we might not. We might talk about rescues at sea, we might not.
The rationale offered for the shift in stance was two-fold: we told you during the campaign we’d be doing things differently. (True, industrial sized hints were given, and reported to a generalised "meh", given the political debate on this issue had long since eclipsed peak, bipartisan, derp.) The second rationale was was we won’t be a “shipping news service” for the people smugglers – which would be fine of course, laudable even, if anyone had in fact had been acting as a shipping news service for the people smugglers. One assumes the people smugglers are canny enough to know when their boats set off and when they arrive; and if they lack access to basic modern communications equipment, or access to intelligence relayed back through communities, presumably they can source transcript of the weekly briefing if the government is in fact their primary source of information. Audacious, that particular straw man.
This is not only a media strategy of course: it’s a governing strategy – it’s about sustaining a positive, less harried narrative in government. Rather than be buffeted by events you get to tell your own story, and reduce the props and accoutrements available for your opponent.
Politics being an intensely perverse and unrewarding artform, Morrison may actually get points in this opening stanza for just stopping the rolling public contention about boat arrivals – for responding to widespread “boat fatigue.”
That would be something, wouldn’t it?
