Scott Morrison has urged colleagues to ramp up examples of “sharp contrast” with Labor as the opposition signalled it could support a strengthening of the character test legislation despite previously helping to scuttle the proposal in the Senate.
The prime minister has revived the Coalition’s character test bill in the hope of wedging Labor on national security in the final sitting weeks of the current parliament. Morrison is attempting to regroup politically after an internal revolt scuttled his signature religious discrimination legislation last week.
The “character test” policy as it stands automatically cancels the visas of non-citizens, primarily New Zealand citizens, who are sentenced to more than 12 months in jail. The proposed bill would lower the bar for the automatic failure of the test.
Labor has previously objected to elements of the character test proposal and a government-controlled parliamentary committee on human rights concluded in December it was not clear there was a “pressing and substantial need for the measures in this bill”.
But Morrison declared candidly in Tuesday’s penultimate party room meeting the character test bill presented the best point of contrast with Labor in the government’s legislative arsenal. It highlighted the “risks” associated with any change of government.
Morrison told MPs that in order to win the election contest in May, the government needed to put “the starkness of the choice in front of the Australian people”. The prime minister said: “I know how to do that, and I know that is how you win elections. I know what the path is and I’ll be following it.”
Labor – which avoided a wedge on religious discrimination last week because of government division – was meeting on Tuesday afternoon to resolve its position on the character test proposal.
Ahead of those deliberations, the shadow home affairs minister, Kristina Keneally, would not rule out waving the visa cancellation bill through parliament. She declared Morrison was pursuing a fight rather than a fix and “playing a political wedge game”.
After the public split over religious discrimination last week and subsequent back-biting inside the government, Morrison warned colleagues on Tuesday to pull their heads in. The prime minister said between now and the election, the government had a job to do: “I’m going to do mine, I need you to do yours.”
While telling colleagues disunity would cost the Coalition government, Morrison acknowledged his own focus on the looming political battle needed to be sharper.
“You haven’t seen me as focused as I can be yet,” he told colleagues, adding “you will see it”.
Morrison said if the government was focused and professional, and if MPs supported each other, the Coalition would win the coming election. “I know where we are going,” Morrison declared. “We will get there.”
With Labor ahead in the polls, and with the government battling splits and leaks, Morrison and the defence minister, Peter Dutton, have ramped up the rhetoric on security, declaring Beijing wants Labor to win the election.
Last week, Dutton said in parliament China had picked Anthony Albanese as its election candidate. The obvious partisanship attracted an implicit rebuke from the head of Australia’s domestic spy, Mike Burgess. During an appearance before Senate estimates on Monday night, Burgess declared that his intelligence agency was “not here to be politicised”.
On Tuesday, the foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne, declined to repeat Morrison’s claim that a Labor government would stand for “appeasement” of China.
When asked whether it was in the national interest for the Coalition to portray Labor as being compromised by China given that it may win government at the election, Payne made a generic statement that it was “essential for those who wish to govern our nation to be clear and to be consistent”.
While she repeated the Coalition’s criticism of the former Labor government for a drop in defence spending as a share of GDP – and insisted it was fair enough to indicate “where we believe our strengths lie” – Payne dodged multiple opportunities to specifically endorse the appeasement claim.
Payne met with her counterparts from the US, Japan and India for a Quad meeting in Melbourne on Friday. She was urged by Prof Rory Medcalf, head of the Australian National University’s National Security College, to “reassure her Quad counterparts they can have confidence in Australia as a security partner, no matter who wins government”.
For years, Payne said, she had reassured Quad partners and other close partners “of Australia’s commitment to the Indo-Pacific” and that it was “a solid partner”. In Tuesday’s Sky News interview, she did not add any caveats about whether that might change with a change of government.
