The coming month of January 2025 is shaping up as Australia Day month. The Coalition has signalled it will be making heavy weather of the weeks leading up to and following Sunday, 26 January. The hubbub will likely focus on Australian flags and an intense determination to stand by the 26th as the day in January sanctified by tradition as the one when the nation contemplates the glories of our history and the impact we make on the world beyond our land of beauty, rich and rare.

The phrase “always was and always will be” will be tossed around. It won’t be a reference to the longevity of Indigenous peoples’ presence on our southern continent but will be associated with the same hallowed number that has marked Australia Day. Its passionate advocates may or may not know that 26 January is the date in 1778 on which Captain Arthur Phillip embarked from his ship at the head of the British fleet of 11 ships and raised the Union Jack at what is now called Sydney Cove, claiming the land as a British convict settlement.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that passionate advocacy needs more than passion. In 2018, Senator Bridget McKenzie’s enthusiasm for sounding patriotic on Sky News had Captain Cook setting foot on Australian soil with the first fleet in 1778. And Scott Morrison spent $6.7 million in 2019 re-enacting Captain Cook’s circumnavigation of Australia, when in fact Lieutenant James Cook sailed along Australia’s east coast during his stopover in 1770. He simply “came, saw, went” as Guy Rundle put it, while also acknowledging the extraordinary maritime achievements of Cook.

The first fleet actually arrived at what is now called Botany Bay on 18 January, but since the 1940s Australia Day has been celebrated on 26 January, commemorating the day when Phillip planted his British flag on land, and his successors began the routine practice of slaughtering its Indigenous inhabitants.

Any suggestions in 2025 of an alternative date to 26 January will be regarded by Peter Dutton’s Coalition and the American media mogul Rupert Murdoch as unpatriotic at best and subversion at worst. Any mention of the word “invasion” will be taken as sedition and the NewsCorp front pages will vent high dudgeon in 80-point bold headlines that shout outraged patriotic zeal in supermarket stands from Hobart in Tassie to Highbury in the far north and Home Hill in the west.

On 1 January 1901, 113 years after Captain Phillip arrived at Sydney Cove, a new southern hemisphere nation called Australia became a reality. It happened when six British colonies agreed to come together under a federal constitution that created a new nation that proudly pledged allegiance to its head of state in London, King Edward VII, Queen Victoria having died in January 1901.

Despite its flaws, the new nation established the core attributes of the Australian character over the century that followed around notions of egalitarianism and the right to a fair go. From its British convict beginnings, our political leaders lionised those qualities, as did the fourth estate. And our soldiers fought wars in its name. As our nation took its first breath, some 16,000 Australian soldiers fought during the years 1899 to 1902 in support of the British colonisers in South Africa against two Dutch Boer provinces that wanted freedom from what they saw as the British jackboot. It was a white man’s war in a predominantly black country, and was the first war fought in the name of the new Australian nation.

By 2001, a hundred years later, an era began which focused relentlessly on lowering the bar on what had become that quintessential Australian egalitarian character. In theory at least, we had come to believe that ours was a classless society. We frowned on the snobbery that prevailed in other countries where people were demarcated, and where the demarcation shut out lower class citizens from living fulfilling lives in ways that those from upper classes took for granted.

The gradual rise of universal education in Australia appeared to make good the notion that every white man was as good as his white mate. That notion was scotched when Prime Minister John Howard set a new standard centred around the idea that it was quite proper for parents to aspire to seek the best education for their offspring. A product of public schooling himself, Howard put in place the conditions under which the pre-eminence of private schooling was perceived to be markedly superior to its public cousin, summarised in essence by the proposition that private schools somehow embodied “values”. These values were never properly defined, but in practice they centred around private schools providing the resources which enabled pupils attending them to achieve academic grades that gave them entry into prized professions, while also ensuring they mixed with like-minded peers. In addition, Howard set in motion a funding model that rewarded parents who chose to send their children to schools outside the public system, thus creating two classes of Australian citizens.

Having established an inherently divisive domestic policy setting around schooling that would touch every family in the nation one way or another, Howard took the further step of revisiting the notion that Australia is fundamentally a white man’s country founded on British colonial origins. He took the view that laws enabling or encouraging entry into Australia by people with dark skin from countries that observe faiths other than Christianity were therefore inherently problematic on grounds of fragmenting “social cohesion”.

To support those views, Howard seized on views expressed in a 1984 book by Professor Geoffrey Blainey titled All for Australia. Blainey is a distinguished historian from The University of Melbourne who argued that Asian immigration since the Vietnam War had gathered momentum too quickly and was accompanied by a multicultural policy that emphasised the rights of ethnic minorities at the expense of the majority of British descent. Blainey saw multiculturalism as an over-reaction to the abandonment of the White Australia policy that had been defended vehemently after World War II by the likes of the Labor Party leader Arthur Calwell.

Howard used Blainey’s immigration analysis of the 1970s and 80s to reignite mistrust of Asian migrants, in particular, and migrants with coloured skin in general. Australia’s infamous Dictation Test under the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 had been implemented for decades until 1958 as a way of maintaining it as a country populated by white Europeans under an unofficial White Australia policy. Those who failed the test, which amounted to almost everyone required to take it, were likely to be refused entry or be deported.

When the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975 removed the last traces of White Australia, Howard began to work in opposition and later in government to undermine multiculturalism and to demonise migrants from non-British backgrounds. By 2007, when he was defeated, one of his final legacies was a citizenship test that all but guaranteed failure by prospective Asian immigrants and asylum seekers. Questions included asking who was Australia’s greatest cricketer, when cricket was played at that time almost exclusively by members of British Commonwealth countries.

However, the dystopian masterstroke that cemented Howard’s legacy was his stopping of the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa from entering Australian waters in August 2001. The boat was carrying 433 refugees, mostly Hazaras from Afghanistan, who had been rescued when the ship’s captain Arne Rinnan, responded to a distress call from an Australian rescue agency in accordance with international law, and proceeded to take them to the nearest port for medical treatment, also in accordance with international law. The Tampa was designed to carry only its 27 crew, not 433 malnourished and dehydrated people, some of whom were unconscious, while others were suffering from dysentery and messy outbreaks of diarrhea. Someone turned off the water on the ship for a time, preventing the washing of detritus from the decks, an eventuality that increased the urgency to get to shore as quickly as possible.

In the confusion over whether to take the rescued people to Merak in Indonesia or Christmas Island in Australian waters, Captain Rinnan decided on Christmas Island despite Australian authorities threatening to charge him with being a people smuggler. Australian troops boarded the ship four miles from Christmas Island and refused to allow it to approach land so that its distressed passengers could disembark.

The domestic ramifications of the Tampa episode in Australia were immediately felt and were also longstanding in their impact on the body politic, with the government and much of the media characterising asylum seekers as queue jumpers falsely seeking refugee status or as criminals attempting to gain illegal entry into Australia. Those bald assertions were readily believed by a large majority of the electorate and largely confirmed by an obliging media. Defence Minister Peter Reith couldn’t resist speculating about whether terrorists would also be among the asylum seekers. His tactic is still employed by populist Coalition leaders as a way of suggesting to voters that a “strong” approach on immigration keeps Australians safe, and that wishy-washy leftists in the Labor Party are a “soft touch”, leaving Australians open to attacks by hordes of swarthy terrorists.

The Australian media did not, and still do not, ask the most obvious questions when such problematic assertions are made, such as why any self-respecting terrorist would take a dangerous maritime route into Australia when it would be much less risky to simply get on an aeroplane with a passport and a visa.

What that has meant over the past quarter of a century is that Australians keep hearing the same populist lines that worked so well for Howard in August 2001, despite his over-reaching with proven falsehoods in October of the same year about asylum seekers throwing their children in the water. Howard’s immigration initiatives, which his critics labelled stunts, greatly assisted him in winning the November 2001 election in the wake of the 9/11 twin towers attack in New York. But the line that resonated most was his proposition that “we will decide who comes into this country and the conditions under which they will come”. That sentence told the Australian voters by innuendo that Howard’s Labor opponent, Kim Beazley at the time, would let anyone into Australia.

Beazley acquiesced to Howard’s Tampa play and lost the 2001 election he was expected to win. Howard has since insisted that Tampa and “children overboard” played only a minor part in the Coalition victory, but it is widely accepted that alarm about asylum seekers and immigration was the determining factors.

Australian voters may have forgotten Howard’s 2001 line on immigration but the Labor Party hasn’t, and it has spooked their appetite for taking stands on principle to this day.

Boats coming from “over there” dominated the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd term of government, causing Kevin Rudd to declare that no asylum seeker trying to enter Australia by boat would ever settle in this country, setting in motion the hell-holes of Manus Island and Nauru as Pacific locations to which boat arrivals were hastily dispatched.

Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison gave every appearance of high-fiving every time a boat arrived during the Gillard period of government and took credit for “stopping the boats” when Abbott assumed office in 2013. It was a boast that Morrison made unverifiable by establishing a protocol banning any public reports of “on-water matters”, including boat arrivals. He curiously breached that protocol on 21 May 2022, election day, when he instructed the Australian Border Force to publicise the interception of a boat from Sri Lanka arriving by happenstance that very day.

Gillard, Rudd and now Anthony Albanese have all failed comprehensively to learn from the lesson that Beazley did not comprehend in 2001. In short, the lesson was that the Coalition’s low road on immigration plays to the worst aspects of human nature, which the electorate has come to expect from the Coalition. They do not expect it of Labor and hold Labor leaders to a higher standard. Jack Welch once advised business leaders that when they don’t have a competitive advantage, they should not compete. The light on the hill has long been Labor’s competitive advantage. Thus, when Labor leaders talk the language of the high road while joining the Coalition in the gutter, they earn the contempt of their supporters on the left and the centre, as well as voters to whom they pander on the right.

Australia’s High Court gave Albanese an opportunity to show some courage when it took the high road of principle in 2023. The court decided that holding asylum seekers in indefinite detention, as Dutton and his Home Affairs colleagues had done for many years, was illegal. But instead of taking that opportunity and going on the attack over Dutton’s incompetent handling of Home Affairs as itemised in detail by Clare O’Neil, Albanese instead apologised. He threw his Immigration Minister Andrew Giles under the bus, and was desperate to demonstrate to Dutton and News Corp that the detainees who had been released were subject to stricter than strict monitoring. He also rushed through draconian laws on monitoring released detainees through parliament for the purpose, making it look like the leader of the Opposition was setting the national agenda. Which he was.

If there were any doubt about that, the prime minister savaged one of his back-bench senators, Fatima Payman, for pressing the idea that the Labor Government should honour its own national conference platform by recognising the state of Palestine. Albanese could see that the relentless carnage of Palestinian citizens by Benjamin Netanyahu would lead to applications for entry into Australia by refugees fleeing Gaza, and was anticipating the usual Trumpian assertions by Dutton about Palestinian criminals entering Australia because Labor is soft on borders.

After the Australia Day hullabaloo settles down in February, the immigration crisis will join the cost-of-living crisis and the nuclear-power crisis as Dutton leads Albanese by the nose into what could well be the government’s election demise in May.

https://johnmenadue.com/a-trumpian-dutton-will-use-howards-legacy-to-march-into-office-and-albanese-will-let-him/

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