Wed, Aug 29, 2018 page9

• Why Australia cannot keep a prime minister in power

  Political turmoil is nothing new, but there was an ugly edge to this bout

  • By David Fickling / Bloomberg
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  Why can Australia not just elect a prime minister and stick with its choice?

  With then-Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull on Friday losing power to his own treasurer, Scott Morrison, in a three-way vote of the governing Liberal Party, the nation has its sixth leader in just over eight years.

  Episodes like this have not been uncommon. The long reigns of figures like Billy Hughes, Robert Menzies, Bob Hawke and John Howard have been interspersed with tumultuous interregnums when the major factions on the right and left sought to realign themselves.

  

  Illustration: Mountain People

  That is what appears to be happening now — but the issues on which this latest coup was organized suggest a darker turn.

  Turnbull’s main antagonists in parliament were Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton and former prime minister Tony Abbott, whom Turnbull himself knifed to win the leadership.

  With the support of News Corp-owned media, they have been attempting to turn the governing right-of-center Liberal Party into a more consistently right-wing and populist grouping.

  Whereas similar movements once split on issues of trade — when the Protectionist and Free Trade parties duked it out in the early years after Federation (in 1901) and welfare spending (during the turmoil that embraced the administrations of John Gorton, William McMahon and Gough Whitlam in the early 1970s) — the key divisions this time are climate change and immigration.

  Morrison’s background as a right-winger who preceded Dutton in the immigration portfolio might suggest he would appeal to that faction, but his economic liberalism and loyalty to Turnbull mean he is loathed by many on the right.

  It remains to be seen whether he will hew more closely to Turnbull’s centrist instincts or fully embrace the populism that put him in the prime minister’s office.

  The proximate cause for the current crisis was the failure of Turnbull’s National Energy Guarantee, an attempt to set long-term power policies that fell victim to the right’s insistence on skewing the playing field in favor of coal, despite the fact that building new thermal generators costs about three times as much as wind and solar.

  A grim drumbeat beneath that has been the right’s attempt to make race and immigration signature issues.

  Dutton has shown a willingness to deal in racist dog-whistles.

  Allowing the immigration of Lebanese Muslims in the 1970s was a “mistake,” he said in 2016.

  White South African farmers should be singled out for fast-track migration because they would “integrate into our society,” he said this year, unlike people who would “lead a life on welfare” or are not “of good character.”

  In recent months he has repeatedly claimed — in defiance of the views of Victoria state’s police commissioner — that Sudanese gangs are terrorizing Melbourne.

  The language is eerily similar to some of the less inflammatory rhetoric of minor-party Senator Fraser Anning, who caused outrage last week with a speech that echoed the Holocaust in calling for “a final solution to the immigration problem.”

  Anning’s demand that future migrants reflect “the historic European Christian composition of Australian society” and his call for an end to Muslim immigration only differ from Dutton’s comments about Lebanese Muslims and white South Africans in being more explicit.

  In that, Dutton’s style goes back to the White Australia migration policy established at the nation’s 1901 founding, which for decades used an unpassable dictation test to ban non-European migrants without being seen to do so. (See footnote)

  The tragedy of this latest round of realignment is that it risks squandering the greatest virtues of modern Australia.

  Since dumping the last vestiges of the White Australia policy in 1973, the nation has become a remarkably successful multicultural society, where almost half of the population are first or second-generation migrants; one in four has roots outside Europe; and one of the five free-to-air television channels broadcasts news in almost 70 languages.

  While the bipartisan support for Australia’s brutal treatment of refugees who arrive by boat is a stain on this record, it is notable that even Dutton pays regular lip service to multiculturalism.

  Australia’s openness to migration is a key factor behind almost 27 years of uninterrupted economic growth since the last recession ended in 1991.

  It also sets the country up well to tackle the challenges of an aging population, as Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Philip Lowe said in a speech earlier this month.

  It is notable that even if you strip out the effects of population increase on economic growth by looking only at per capita GDP, three of the four weakest decades were in the period between 1910 and 1940, at the height of the White Australia policy.

  The same goes for climate and energy. As the world’s driest continent and one of its largest agricultural exporters, Australia is particularly at risk from the effects of a changing climate. It is currently suffering one of the worst droughts in living memory, and rising sea temperatures may destroy the Great Barrier Reef by mid-century.

  Blessed with abundant wind and solar power, even major emitters such as Energy Australia Pty and AGL Energy Ltd are planning for a carbon-free future in spite of the best efforts of the wreckers on the right of the government.

  Households and businesses are increasingly taking matters into their own hands to generate solar power from their own roofs, and South Australia state will be producing almost three-quarters of its electricity from renewable sources by 2021.

  That is why the stakes are so high, as Morrison decides which way to steer the ship of state. Just when the world may feel it is stumbling down a darkening path, Australia offers the prospect of a different way: a country that has outgrown its vicious origins to become one of the richest and happiest on the back of migration, trade, and an embrace of its environment.

  The costs of choosing the wrong course could reverberate for generations.

  FOOTNOTE

  Under the dictation test, immigration officers who did not want to grant entry permits were able to demand that non-European visitors transcribe texts in multiple languages, including Estonian or Scots Gaelic, giving them discretion about whom to allow in.

  It is often forgotten that the core of the White Australia policy was not so much racial discrimination per se, as the use of this test to allow an unofficial policy of discrimination to be framed as a less charged issue of linguistic integration.

  Australia’s founders were concerned not to disrupt Britain’s relations with its non-white colonies by forcing the crown to grant royal assent to an explicitly racist law. That did not mean the intent was any less racist. Non-Europeans “are, in comparison with white races — I think no one wants convincing of this fact — unequal and inferior,” Australia’s first prime minister, Edmund Barton, told parliament during the debate on the Immigration Restriction Act, which instituted the policy.

  “The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman,” Barton said.
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