Peter Dutton has had quite the week.
On Wednesday morning, standing in a hangar at Sydney airport, surrounded by returning Olympians and with a green-and-gold scarf around his neck, the opposition leader launched a blistering dual attack on people from Gaza who’d been granted visas for Australia and on the Albanese government that issued them.
It was a strange time and place to do it, at the tail end of an interview about how great the Games had been, how little sleep we’d all had, and the gutsy determination of the Stingers water polo team in snagging a silver medal.
The Asio director general, Mike Burgess, had been on ABC TV’s Insiders program on Sunday morning and had been asked about the visa process for people from Gaza and Asio’s concerns about social cohesion. He expressed no concerns about the process but reiterated his previous warnings that inflammatory language, including from political leaders, could lead to violence and should be avoided.
Burgess’s remarks about Gazan visa eligibility received little coverage initially. The shadow home affairs minister, James Paterson, was reported as saying Australia shouldn’t prioritise people from Gaza who supported Hamas – a listed terrorist organisation – because their presence could damage social cohesion.
When parliament returned on Monday from its five-week hiatus, Dutton didn’t take up the cause. The opposition’s themes in House of Representatives question time were the cost of living, the government’s broken makarrata promise and the activities of the CFMEU. There were no questions about Gaza visas. On Tuesday, the word “Gaza” was not uttered during the day’s lower-house proceedings at all.
But then, on Wednesday morning, at the end of an Olympics interview with Sky News, Dutton was asked for his thoughts on security checks for visa applicants from Gaza.
“Well, I just think every Australian would be shocked to think the government’s bringing in people from a war zone and that Asio is not conducting checks and searches on these people,” Dutton responded. He went on to say that applicants from Gaza should be subjected to biometric tests – something Burgess had explained several days earlier were only useful if those being tested were already on agencies’ radar and registered on a database.
“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.”
It caught media attention. In that day’s question time, Dutton followed through, making it the subject of every opposition question, drowning out all else.
Having successfully captured the news agenda for 24 hours, Dutton kept it going. On Thursday morning, he summoned Coalition MPs to the annexe outside the chamber for a quick briefing. He told them he was about to move a special motion on Gaza – he didn’t detail any more than that – and they needed to take their seats as soon as the bells rang at 9am and show support.
In the speech that followed, he accused the government of “an egregious breach” of the nation’s interests and of a change of policy in allowing people from Gaza to enter Australia on visitor visas. Never mind that it wasn’t a change of policy – successive governments have often issued visitor visas in emergency circumstances, the kind on which Australian citizens can bring Grandma in from abroad for a six-to-12-month visit – or that the remarks were misleading on the visa process and in continued defiance of Burgess’s warnings.
It’s perfectly legitimate for the Coalition to ask questions and raise concerns about whether the visa process is appropriately strict for people coming from a hotspot that is governed by a listed terrorist organisation. But Dutton’s approach generated more public debate than it did answers.
For him, politically speaking, it turned out to be fortuitous that the way he framed his response to a random Wednesday morning question had such an instantly incendiary effect on the news cycle and put the government so effectively on the back foot. That afternoon, an unrelated news story emerged that made the Liberal party a laughing stock across the country and even overseas.
In the nation’s most populous state, New South Wales, the party’s administrators were having to explain how they managed to fail to meet the deadline for nominating more than 130 candidates for next month’s local government elections, including those already serving on councils, some of them having held office for 20 years.
The monumental blunder will probably cost it 50 local council seats but also the all-important local networks that councillors access, which are crucial for supporting other Liberal campaigns, for example at the coming federal election. They’ll be without them for the next four years.
At the last NSW local government elections, Liberal candidates could lodge their own forms but this time the party had decided to do it centrally and online. The system was “clunky”, according to one insider, and it turned out that each application was taking up to 25 minutes.
Gradually, starting at the weekend, candidates began to realise their forms still hadn’t been lodged. Stories now abound of early-hours emails and Liberals rushing around Sydney, trying to find and rouse justices of the peace.
By Tuesday, it was clear the task could not be completed in time for the midday Wednesday deadline. It’s understood a relatively junior party staffer called the NSW president, Don Harwin, on Tuesday night with the bad news.
It’s not clear exactly when the federal Liberal party was alerted but its senior figures have since made their extreme displeasure known.
This is not the first huge administrative blunder to occur recently. Ahead of last year’s byelection in the southern Sydney seat of Cook, caused by Scott Morrison’s retirement, it transpires that the state directorate forgot to send out postal vote ballot papers. Richard Shields kept his job.
It is also not the division’s only preselection shambles. It earned itself intervention ordered by then prime minister, Morrison, a former NSW state director, before the 2022 federal election when factional warfare – featuring his own centre-right faction – caused damaging delays in choosing candidates. That predated Shields’ directorship.
Both incidents saw federal Liberal candidates affected by the NSW brawls and administrative failures.
At a late-night executive meeting on Thursday, to which he took legal representation, Shields was sacked, having tried to shift blame to Harwin, who serves in a voluntary capacity. Unofficially from afar, Peter Dutton had dangled the threat of federal intervention.
Unsurprisingly, the debacle had found its way into federal parliamentary question time earlier on Thursday, by way of a set-up government question to the local government minister, Kristy McBain, former Labor mayor of the NSW south-coast town of Bega.
“That’s what happens when you’ve got a NSW Liberal party failing to do the one job they had, which was to lodge a form on time,’ McBain said, in answer to a set-up question from her own side. “Could you believe that? They had one job and they failed at it – unfathomable. And those opposite want us, want the Australian people, to believe they can run a country when they can’t even lodge a form. They think the Australian people will fall for a nuclear plan. They’re going to build them and run them, but they can’t lodge a form!”
But McBain was the only one from the government who took a swipe. With Albanese and his ministers still being pounded about processes involving national security – and selectively quoting Burgess to talk up Asio’s role – they didn’t take the risk of trying to deflect with jabs about a Liberal local government stuffup, even one as big as this.
If there wasn’t a huge debate raging about the government’s competence in managing visa processes, Albanese and other senior colleagues would have gone to town.
Turned out to be fortunate for the federal Liberals that the answer to a single Wednesday question engulfed the parliament and the political news for the rest of the week.
