When he was immigration minister O’Connor said boats couldn’t be stopped.
“Well, of course, it’s absurd to say what Tony Abbott said, which is the boats will be stopped if he were to be elected, within months,” said O’Connor. “He knows that’s a lie. He knows that that is not going to happen.”
When Tony Burke took over as minister he raised fears that turn-backs would lead to asylum-*seekers drowning (an audacious attack given the 1200 deaths under Labor). “When cornered,” he said of the Coalition, “they’ve even acknowledged that that’s the limitation of their turn back boats policy.”
Most emphatic of all, of course, was Rudd. When he was trying to undermine Julia Gillard to regain the prime ministership in June last year, he upped the ante on *Abbott’s policy. “He says he will stop the boats and he will send them back to Indonesia, that is an absolute lie,” said Rudd. “He knows that. Everyone who knows this area of policy well knows that. It’s more of a slogan than a substantive policy position.”
His foreign minister, Bob Carr, agreed. “He is right, it is a lie. The idea that a boat with 200 people on it, delivered into Australian waters by a *people-smuggler, can simply be told to turn around and go back to Indonesia, or that Australian border security forces are going to be able to cart it to an Indonesian port, is a fantasy.”
Soon after reclaiming the prime ministership, Rudd turned up the volume to 11. “I’m very concerned,” he said of Abbott’s turn-back policy, “I really wonder whether he’s trying to risk some sort of conflict with Indonesia.”
The most extraordinary observation on Labor’s wrongheadedness was how it was largely endorsed by the ABC, Fairfax press and much of the press *gallery.
Never mind that turnbacks had worked under the Howard government or that Labor’s approach had triggered only chaos, deaths and a dramatic acceleration of boat arrivals — the political elite criticised the Coalition’s policies.
Labor’s argument, effectively, was that the Coalition had a pretend plan for a problem that was insoluble; and it had many convinced. In July 2012 Michelle Grattan declared in The Age that turn-backs shouldn’t be tried.
“It’s not just the danger posed by the turnaround policy; it’s also the Indonesians’ resistance to it that is a problem,” she wrote. In The Sydney Morning Herald Phil Coorey said the Indonesians would “no longer allow it”.
And in The Australian Financial Review Laura Tingle was arguing not only that the policy was problematic but that it was losing political impact: “When people in focus groups are asked whether they believe Tony Abbott can really ‘stop the boats’, they don’t believe it.”
The fact is, in five months from December last year, 12 boats were turned back and this year only one boat has delivered asylum-seekers to Australia. Turn-backs worked and the boats were stopped.
Many people were emphatically wrong, for a long time, yet the air of unreality continues. After Abbott won power last year and started to implement Operation Sovereign Borders, Labor and some journalists saw trouble.
In November Tingle wrote that the Coalition was preparing “for the inevitable time when ambitious claims made in opposition — such as ‘we will turn back the boats’ — proved to be impossible to implement”.
Network Ten and Radio *National commentator Paul Bongiorno tweeted: “Government backdown sinks tow back or turn back the boats boast, Indonesia calls the shots as predicted for 3 years.”
In a new high point of chutzpah three months later, when it was revealed turn-backs had been successful (so Bongiorno had actually been wrong for three years), he tweeted this: “Boat turn backs was always going to work. But at what cost?” Indeed.