Beazley puts himself behind on the refugee issue

To some extent the Labor campaign has fallen into the trap of fighting on the government’s ground. For some years now Labor has ostentatiously eschewed the One Nation vote (while sometimes managing to grab more than 50% of the preferences of One Nation voters). The strategy seemed to be to firm up the vote in the cities with the well-educated and the migrants, whilst conceding a large number of regional seats. But on the refugee issue it has abandoned the moral high ground making it more vulnerable to the government’s jibes that Beazley lacks "the ticker" for the job.

Faced with a dominating issue which favours your opponent you have three choices. The first choice is to ignore it by backing your opponent’s position as far as you can and hoping it will disappear as an issue quickly. This is the lowest risk option, and one that poll driven campaigning would most generally favour. The second choice in terms of risk is to accept your opponent’s position but find some point of difference so that you can save face with supporters who oppose it, and say at a later date that you weren’t in favour of it anyway.

The high-risk strategy is to boldly attack either the whole policy, or a significant part of it and take on public opinion in an effort to change it. This is the tack that poll driven strategists will never recommend, unless you are so far behind in the polls you have nothing left to lose.

Beazley has decided to ignore the refugee issue and hope that it goes away, but has fallen into the trap of getting drawn into the subsidiary issue (from an election point of view) of the terrorist threat. It would be interesting to see how his ten point plan to fight terrorism runs in focus groups, but I suspect it will only add to doubts about Beazley for being long on rhetoric, short on action.

However, the terrorism issue did offer Beazley an opportunity to remove the refugee issue from the election agenda as well as proving his leadership credentials. This catastrophe has made us in the West all much more aware of the sacredness and fragility of human life, and of the terrible tyrannies under which many people live in countries like Afghanistan. It provided the opportunity to frame the refugee question in different terms.

While 70% of Australians believe that our borders have to be kept secure, the percentage that believes that people should be left to die at sea must surely be miniscule, and even smaller in the ashes of the WTC. The refugee problem needs a long term solution, not short term measures, and should not feature as a debating ground in any election. The challenge could have been laid down to the government to run a bipartisan policy on the issue, thus raising the suspicion that the refugees are only being used as an electoral ploy.

Such a challenge, whilst higher risk, would tend to intensify the educated city vote and reinforce the strategy that the ALP had been implementing so successfully since the arrival of One Nation. The tack that Beazley has taken runs the risk of making urban voters uneasy, at the same time as it fails to win support from One Nation voters. It also raises questions about his leadership as he appears to kow-tow to these voters.

Other issues, such as the Ansett collapse, are also exogenously and metaphorically falling out of the sky. Beazley’s ability to exploit them will be damaged if he can be discredited on the question of leadership. Playing low risk politics has put him in a position where that is very likely to be the case. If he wants to do well he needs to invest some risk taking into his cold calculations.

As it stands, the only strategic advantage that Beazley has gained out of the refugee and related issues is that the government is now the front-runner and Labor the under-dog. That will take some of the pressure off Labor to produce policies, and transfer it to the government, but I’m sure it wasn’t part of the plan.