Dutton’s Gaza adventure turns into electoral suicide.

The Liberals are betting the election on yet another terrorism scare campaign – but they’re alienating the very people whose votes they must have.

The deaths of children: at last count, 16,456

 The core selling-point for progressive politics is the hope that things will get better. For conservatives, it’s the fear that they will get worse.

This fundamental split between left and right explains much about the stance of each side of Australian federal politics on race and immigration – and, at the moment, on refugees from Gaza. The federal opposition is pushing stridently to ban any people from Gaza from coming to Australia.

“If people are coming in from that war zone and we're uncertain about their identity or allegiances — Hamas is a listed terrorist organisation,” said the opposition leader, Peter Dutton.

“I don't think people should be coming in from that war zone at all at the moment. It's not prudent to do so and I think it puts our national security at risk.”

Peter Dutton has badly misread the issue and the country. At the time of writing, at least 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza, almost half of them children. Many more are starving. The Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated areas in the world, is now rubble.

Yet the Liberals and Nationals expect Australian voters, instead of feeling compassion, to be frightened into ruthlessness. It has worked well for the conservatives in the past, winning them a series of elections. But it’s not working now, and migrant communities – and not just Islamic communities – are taking it personally.

Dai Le ... 'triggering'

Dai Le, the independent member for Fowler in western Sydney, came to Australia as a refugee child fleeing war and chaos in Vietnam. Dutton’s call was “triggering”, she said.

“I’m thinking, ‘Gosh, what if there are families like mine, exactly the same position, but then another country ... is saying ‘they’re all terrorists’.

“That would mean that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to be where I am today.”

Sally Sitou, now the Labor member for the inner-Sydney seat of Reid, is the daughter of  refugees fleeing from Laos and the Vietnam war. They were welcomed to Australia by a government led by a very different Liberal from Peter Dutton.

“My family's story was only possible because men and women in this place turned to the better angels of their nature,” she said. “In 1977, then-prime minister Malcolm Fraser developed Australia's first comprehensive refugee policy. One year later, my family arrived in this country.

“This is my direct appeal to the leader of the opposition: do not stoke fear in the communities.”

In the House of Representatives, racist hatreds exploded from the opposition benches. The teal independent, Zali Steggall, attempted to speak in support of refugees and other migrants but faced a wall of strident heckling. The episode showed parliament at its worst and its best. The ABC’s Brett Worthington was there.

“Steggall was speaking after Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and immigration spokesman Dan Tehan had channelled their fiercest fire and fury as they sought to bring on a debate about the government's vetting of Palestinians fleeing Gaza,” he wrote.

“As Dutton joined the hecklers, Steggall implored she be heard in silence like he had been.”

In plain contrast, Labor and crossbench MPs behaved with decency and compassion.

“Instead, it was a moment of kindness, of women being fed up with what other women in the chamber have to face on an all too regular basis,” Worthington wrote.

“Labor's chief whip Jo Ryan and cabinet minister Tanya Plibersek led the way, followed closely by NSW MPs Alison Byrnes and Sharon Claydon. They occupied seats around Steggall as the crossbencher continued to speak. Their numbers quickly grew with Sally Sitou, Carina Garland and ACT MP David Smith joining them.

“Word was spreading about what was playing out, with teals soon streaming into the chamber to offer their support.”

The message from the Liberals was clear, both to the teal independents now occupying former Liberal heartland seats and to those who vote for them: we despise you. We are not interested in your vote at the next election and we are not interested in any teal support in the House of Representatives.

A soft target?

There aren’t many Palestinians in Australia, so the Liberals might have thought they would be an easy, safe target. The numbers have always been tiny.

Even now, those numbers will not be greatly boosted. Between the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October and 12 August, the government has granted 2,922 visa applications from Palestinians and rejected 7,111. About 1,300 of those with approved visas have resettled in Australia.

The numbers will remain low for two reasons: those being approved already have family connections in Australia; and nobody is getting out of Gaza at the moment anyway.

But, in the wake of Israel’s pitiless war in Gaza, two things have happened. First, public sympathy for Palestinians and the Palestinian cause is far higher than it has ever been. Second, many other Australians also feel threatened by the coalition’s onslaught. And that includes not only a wide range of other migrant communities but also those people who still believe in the ideal of a fair go for all.

The soft target isn’t so soft after all.

The seductive attractions of racist politics

As a method of safeguarding the safety of Australians, Dutton’s campaign is irrelevant. It makes sense only as a political ploy.

There’s a very long history to all this, but its current phase can be traced to a speech given 40 years ago by the historian Geoffrey Blainey. He claimed that Australian society was being fundamentally and surreptitiously changed by Asian immigrants, that they were responsible for unemployment and that the Hawke Labor government was biased for Asians and against the interests of other Australians:

“The pace of Asian immigration to Australia is now well ahead of public opinion,” Blainey told his audience. “Rarely in the history of the modern world has a nation given such preference to a tiny ethnic minority of its population as the Australian government has done in the past few years, making that minority the favourite majority in its immigration policy …

“The unemployment in many Australian cities, more than any other factor, causes the present unease about the increasing rate of Asian immigration. These are the suburbs where the Asians are most likely to settle. These are the suburbs where they are most likely to work. But these are the suburbs where the rates of unemployment tend to be the highest.”

John Howard, later to become Liberal Prime Minister, joined in, giving massive oxygen to a debate that quickly became ugly and divisive. In a 1988 radio interview, he said Asian immigration should be “slowed down a little, so that the capacity of the community to absorb was greater.”

Many Australians of Asian descent no longer felt welcome or safe in this country. Though Howard, Blainey and their followers hotly denied they were pursuing racist policies, that’s what they incontrovertibly were.

Howard, a little scorched by the backlash he received, backed away from some of the rhetoric. But in the lead-up to the 1996 election which brought the Liberals into government and  Howard to the Prime Ministership, a little-known fish-and-chip shop owner called Pauline Hanson was disendorsed from the party for her clearly racist remarks against aboriginal and Asian people. She stood as an independent and was elected. Howard refused to criticise her and, tacitly, endorsed her views.

But in 2001, by now Prime Minister but facing the prospect of electoral defeat, he initiated a flagrant, potent and durable episodes of racist politics.

A Swedish cargo ship, the MV Tampa, had rescued a group of Hazara refugees from a small floundering boat in the Indian Ocean who were fleeing lethal persecution by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Under international law, the Tampa’s master was not only required to conduct that rescue but entitled to land them in Australia.

Howard, refusing to follow his own government’s treaty obligations, denied them permission to land. “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come,” he proclaimed. The Labor Party, led by the habitually timid Kim Beazley, buckled under, eventually endorsing Howard’s policy and setting Australia up for two decades of refugee-bashing.

Between the Tampa episode and the election, Islamist terrorists flew passenger aircraft into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York.

Howard won the election. And the next.

But none of those predictions of unemployment, poverty and social disruption came true. Since 2000, the number of Australian residents born in East and South-East Asia has increased by 173% and, for those from South Asia, by 703%.

The unemployment rate, despite today’s interest rates and an economic slowdown, is less than half the level of 1984, when Blainey made his claims. Australia remains a successful multicultural society.

The Australian Election Study, conducted at the time of each federal election, provides long-term data on the enduring trends in Australian politics and society. It shows that initially after the 2001 Tampa election, angst about migration fell. But, as relentless onslaughts from radio shock-jocks and right-wing newspapers took hold, it rose again. And the fear was periodically invigorated by terrorist incidents, all of them conducted by radicalised Islamists who thought they were doing God’s work by killing Australians. Between 2014 and 2018, five such incidents – including the Lindt Café siege in Sydney – were inspired by propaganda from the Islamic State movement.

But then the terrorist incidents stopped. Islamic State was defeated and security authorities became better at detecting and preventing attacks. By 2022, only 26% of Australians thought there were too many migrants and only 19% thought they were being unduly favoured in policy.

In the current economic environment, both major parties want to – for now – restrict immigration levels. But this is only about a sudden and temporary surge in numbers after the pandemic. It’s not about race, and the aim is to get the level back to the longer-term average, not to cut it any further.

Another indication that the current temporary policies are not about race is that they are also supported by migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds. A Redbridge poll in April, on how these policies affected voting intention, found broad support from both “English-only” and “other languages” groups. 

Broadly, Australians welcome migrants, and that attitude has firmed strongly in the most recent results. The Australian Election Study for 2022 showed 76% thought migrants made the country more open and a record 65% thought they were good for the economy. Negative attitudes were at record lows: 30% thought migration increased crime and 23% thought it increased crime rates.

Those attitudes seem to extend to asylum seekers. In 2022, the proportion of people who thought boats should be turned back was down to 44%, despite this being the policy of both major parties.

Political reality: migrants and marginals

It is usually regarded as a bad idea in politics to alienate voters whose support you must have to gain power. For decades, the Liberals have succeeded in driving migrant voters away. The Gaza adventure confirms that long-standing trend.

At the time of the 2021 census, there were 13 federal electorates in which more than 50% of households spoke a language other than English. All except one are held by Labor, mostly with huge margins. The only exception is Fowler in western Sydney. It has a very high migrant population, mostly of people of Vietnamese descent. But the once ultra-safe seat was thrown away by Labor in a faction deal which defenestrated a popular local Vietnamese-background candidate in a brutal factional deal that attempted to parachute a party heavyweight into the seat.

This shows how profoundly migrant communities have rejected the conservative parties and put their trust in Labor. Nevertheless, the Redbridge poll showed people from non-English speaking backgrounds, though favouring Labor, have not written off the Liberals entirely. There is one important caveat: this poll was taken before Peter Dutton announced the policy on Gaza.

On specific issues, this pattern holds. Labor holds a definite edge, particularly in energy and foreign policy, but the Liberals retain levels of approval that they would be unwise to alienate. With their Gaza adventure, they may be doing just that.

The hard realities of electoral arithmetic show the Liberals have a difficult, and perhaps impossible, journey back to government. Their lurch further to the right over migration potentially makes the task even harder.

Any party needs at least 75 seats in the House of Representatives to form majority government. Labor, with 77 at the 2022 election, just got there. The Liberal-National total of 58 left them with a deficit of 17. That balance changed slightly in Labor’s favour when it won the Melbourne outer suburban seat of Aston from the Liberals.

But the crossbench stands at 16, having expanded massively at the cost of both major parties – but particularly at the expense of the Liberals. This broadening of the crossbench included seven inner-city seats that once formed the Liberal heartland but which were won by relatively progressive ‘teal’ independents. Ever since, the Liberals have busily and unnecessarily angered those new members. In Brisbane, the Greens added three seats, bringing their total to four.

Of the entire crossbench there is only one firm conservative: Bob Katter, who represents the western Queensland electorate of Kennedy. Of the other 15, it is unlikely that more than one or two would support the Liberals and Nationals to form minority government. So, even to form minority government, the Coalition parties would have to win an extra 16 or 17 seats without losing any they currently hold. But they seem more likely to lose seats than to gain them.

Of the 151 electorates in the House of Representatives, 78 (or 52%) have more than 15% of households in which a language other than English is spoken. And 24 of those are classified by the Australian Electoral Commission as marginal. For either major party, there is no path to government except through these seats.

The four most vulnerable – suburban seats in Melbourne and Adelaide – were retained, just, by Liberals at the 2022 election. One, Aston, has already gone to Labor in a by-election. Of the rest, ten are formerly safe Liberal seats that are now held by Labor, the Greens or progressive independents. Four formerly safe seats are now marginal.

Any political benefit that the Liberal and National parties have gained by their vilification of migrants is massively outweighed by the electoral cost. As the country has become more tolerant and more progressive, the Liberals have gone in the opposite direction. Their moderate wing, never strong, no longer exists. Both major parties are in decline but only Labor can look forward, for the foreseeable future, to forming government.

Unless the damage caused by the past four decades of migrant-bashing can be rectified – and how could that be achieved? – there is no realistic likelihood of Australia having a Liberal government again in the foreseeable future. And perhaps we never will.