The only thing of substance — stretching the word to breaking point — from Peter Dutton’s campaign rally yesterday was a “publication” (Dutton’s generous term) bearing a title on which you can almost smell the stale coffee tang of a long focus group: “Let’s Get Australia Back On Track“.
The MAGA echo is intentional, obviously; in the manner of those godawful ’70s Britcoms that would eventually make their way to Australia, minus most of the cast, to become Are You Being Served Down Under or Father Dear Father Down Under, this is Let’s Make America Great Again Down Under.
Dutton — alas for us — is no John Inman or Patrick Cargill, and in the manner of local actors shoehorned into the roles created by foreign performers and renamed for copyright reasons, the Coalition frontbench is no match for the clutch of crazies Donald Trump is assembling for his team. But the real point is to simply recycle the same tropes, slogans and gurning mannerisms that proved a hit in the original context. Catchphrase comedy, they called it. Little did we know we’d end up with an entire political system based on it.
What MAGA Down Under shows up, however, is the curious extent to which Dutton is struggling on migration. Once his signature issue, one of his earliest major commitments as opposition leader and a vehicle for his blatant racism, migration is looking increasingly like an exposed nerve rather than a strong point. After announcing a big cut to net overseas migration in May (without consulting with his shadow treasurer), Dutton backflipped and abandoned the cut in December, leaving even the Coalition’s media friends to accuse him of “equivocation”. Whither the strong man?
So what does MAGA Down Under offer on the subject? The catchphrase comedy is all there, taken straight from Trump. “The integrity of our migration system has been undermined by Labor’s border security failures. This has seen criminal people smuggling syndicates back in business,” it avers (presumably the same criminal syndicates that so artfully exploited Dutton’s loss of control of our borders). “A new person is migrating to Australia every 46 seconds. This is unsustainable … Convicted criminals have been released from immigration detention into our communities, often proceeding to re-offend against innocent Australians.”
But what specifically would Dutton do? The pamphlet promises to “reduce migration to sensible levels that our housing supply can handle” (on current dwelling approval figures, that’d involve pretty much shutting the borders). But shortly after that, Dutton also commits to “ensure we have an adequate number of skilled visas for those in the construction sector to support our capable local workforce.”
According to the Coalition-friendly Master Builders’ Association, the construction workforce alone needs an extra 130,000 people right now — a number that would dwarf the one migration policy Dutton still has, to cut permanent migration to 140,000. On that basis, Dutton is planning to initially increase net overseas migration. No wonder he ditched his promised cut.
The document also airily commits the Coalition to fixing what it describes as “a serious shortage of GPs … By 2031, it is expected that we will have a shortage of up to 8,000 GPs across Australia”. Where are they coming from? Perhaps the Coalition can try to attract foreign students doing medical degrees to remain in Australia? Oh, wait, MAGA Down Under promises to “reduce the number of international students” — albeit without saying how, given Dutton blocked Labor’s legislation to reduce the number of evil foreign students.
“A Dutton Coalition Government will rebalance our migration program to restore confidence and integrity, and to relieve pressure on housing and community services,” MAGA Down Under emphasis. But balance between what? It never says. Workforce migration and non-workforce migration? Humanitarian and economic migration? Temporary and permanent migration? Who knows?
Dutton is offering the catchphrases and slogans, the mugging and capering of the original Trump brand, but the delivery is off, the local references jarring, the production incompetent. Most of all, Dutton himself is badly confused about his lines. Does he want more migration or less? Does he want to fix workforce shortages or exacerbate them? The answer seems to change depending on which bit of his pamphlet you read.
It’s one thing for an opposition to go to an election with a minimal policy offering and hope it can demonise enough people to earn a swing. Quite another, though, to be genuinely confused on an issue allegedly central to its offering.
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