Pearls and Irritations

One full day during the Republican National Convention in the US last month was devoted entirely to the issue of crime. Under the title “Make America Safe Again”, it referenced a make-believe crime wave engulfing American cities.

Writing in the New York Times, Paul Krugman reported that Donald Trump spoke at an event in Detroit at which he summarised the entire focus of the day as America being caught up in a “Kamala crime wave”, claiming that crime levels “nobody has ever seen before” were taking over America’s big cities, “almost all run by Democrats”.

The Detroit News had agreed to interview Trump as part of the campaign, but after the newspaper began asking about crime data before the interview, the former president pulled out. It appears he did not want to get caught up in a discussion about crime rates because the data did not support an increase in crime. Krugman pointed out that Detroit homicides were lower in 2021 and 2022 than they were in 2020 and had reduced sharply in 2023. It was not a discussion that Trump wanted any part of. He wanted to make uncontested assertions, without foundation, such as this: “You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot. You get mugged. You get raped.” And, more than likely, the perpetrator of these fantasy crimes is an immigrant.

The cadence of those sweeping assertions, unsupported by evidence, is the standard Trump tone we have heard during the decades before and the years since his four-year occupation of the Oval Office. A full-page advertisement placed by him, expressing that same tone of false certainty in 1989, poisoned the minds of New York jurors and helped jail five innocent black minors for 10 to 15 years for a Central Park rape they did not commit.

An eerily similar cadence has been heard coming out of the mouth of Trump’s political protégé Down Under. In 2018, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton was informing Australian voters with alarm that the denizens of Melbourne were too frightened to go out to dinner because black African gangs had taken over the streets of their city. While it is likely that not a single Melburnian cancelled a dinner appointment, it won the votes of gullible citizens prone to accept the confident assertions of a strong man who appeared to be in possession of reliable information and was prepared to forcefully speak his mind.

By 2018, Dutton was establishing himself as Australia’s fierce defender of our borders, a mantle he took over from his immigration predecessor, one Scott Morrison, the man who took credit for stopping the boats that had not stopped, but that we no longer heard about.

In the wake of the defeat of the Morrison Government in May 2022, Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil tabled reports during February 2024 that she had commissioned by a former head of ASIO, Dennis Richardson, and a former Commissioner of Police, Christine Nixon. The reports revealed long-term incompetence on a massive scale in the maladministration of visa policy and immigration under O’Neil’s predecessor, Dutton, and his department secretary, Mike Pezzullo. The Richardson report also set out details of billion-dollar contracts having been awarded without tender. The contracts were given to Liberal Party donor firms to operate offshore facilities on Manus Island and Nauru. One was with a notorious company called Paladin, and another with Canstruct which, at the time it won a $1.8 billion contract, had no assets, no staff and no revenue.

In separate reports published in independent media outlets, former immigration deputy secretary Abul Rizvi confirmed the administrative neglect under Dutton and Pezzullo led to the greatest people-trafficking scam in Australia’s history. It involved money laundering, labour stings and sex trafficking on an industrial scale, and are still problems despite steps taken by former immigration minister, Andrew Giles, to fix it.

Despite the juicy newsworthiness inherent in stories about people trafficking, money laundering and the smell of corruption around the awarding of contracts during Dutton’s watch, O’Neil’s reports attracted precious little media attention at the mainstream outlets of News Corporation, Nine Entertainment, Seven West Media, the Ten Network and the ABC.

By contrast and at the same time, those legacy media outlets gave blanket coverage to a story arising from a November 2023 High Court decision that determined indefinite detention of refugees was illegal. The media story related to 149 detainees released in response to the judicial decision, many of whom had been held in indefinite detention for years. The department had released details about the detainees, some of whom had convictions for violent offences and theft, and Giles was put under great pressure by the Opposition Immigration spokesman Dan Tehan, Home Affairs spokesman James Paterson, and their media backers led by News Corp, to reassure the public that appropriate steps had been taken to monitor detainees who might offend.

Dutton insisted that the only detainee who should have been released was the one who took the action in the High Court. That angle received plenty of media coverage despite the fact it is not how the law works in Australia, which got little coverage.

When a Sky News reporter asked O’Neil, Giles and Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus at a press conference whether they would be apologising to the Australian people for releasing the detainees, Dreyfus came back with a forthright no. He was emphatic; there would be no apology for following the direction of Australia’s High Court. Within days Prime Minister Anthony Albanese informed the Parliament that Dreyfus had apologised to the offended Sky News reporter, presumably because Albanese instructed him to do so.

With that apology, Albanese had validated Dutton’s high dudgeon about the release of refugees. Albanese’s weak-willed support for humanitarian policy and observing the rule of law enabled Dutton to connect refugees with assertions, however far-fetched, about their supposed inclination to commit heinous crimes against Australian citizens going about their lives.

At that time, it was Dutton’s good fortune that a conflict was unfolding on the Gaza strip. Defenceless Palestinians were being pushed into tent cities and Gaza was reduced to rubble by incessant Israeli bombing that killed tens of thousands of civilians. This was a scenario for a flood of Palestinian refugees into neighbouring countries such as Egypt and Jordan, and for a small number, with family connections, to find their way into distant locations such as Australia.

Even though there are no Palestinian refugees coming into Australia at present because Israel has closed the Rafah crossing into Egypt, Dutton and his shadow spokesmen are getting daily media coverage by spreading alarm about national security, Hamas “terrorists” and sundry “criminals” who could be among Palestinian refugees that the Government is planning to let in.

Dutton knows Albanese has been ambiguous and indecisive since 7 October last year when the latest conflict was sparked. Albanese has been reluctant to call for a ceasefire, but has called for Israeli “restraint”, a word that Dutton has been happy to endorse as “pussyfooting”, while he takes the strongest possible stand on unrestrained collective punishment by Israel against Palestine.

In summary, the strong man Dutton is systematically assuming “responsibility” for the government agenda on national security and the protection of Australian citizens. He makes use of a friendly media to play on the relentless message that the Albanese Government cannot be trusted to stand strong against assorted terrorists, rapists, paedophiles and murderers who will be let loose when the time comes for fleeing Gazans to seek refuge in Australia.

Like Trump, Dutton has created public confusion over the words “refugee” and “criminal”. Refugees come from somewhere else, they are desperate, they have brown skin, they cannot be trusted. They bring disease, they bring crime. It therefore follows that “no 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”, says Dutton.

His Home Affairs spokesman follows that up by insisting that the Government should cancel the visas of any Palestinians in Australia who have expressed support for Hamas, and deport them.

Mike Burgess, the head of Australia’s intelligence agency ASIO, made a rare public statement during the early weeks of August. He stated that “words matter” and that “inflamed language” may fuel community tensions and damage social cohesion. By then, however, the damage had been done, and ASIO’s call encouraged Dutton to throw more fuel on the fire. Dutton saw that Albanese had fallen for his populist alarmism and doubled down with heightened levels of apprehension.

Albanese, for his part, had appointed an anti-semitism envoy, thus legitimising Dutton’s apprehension about thousands of attendees at pro-Palestine rallies. Albanese had also engaged in a disproportionately antagonistic response to a Labor Senator, Fatima Payman, who crossed the floor in June to call for Australia to recognise the state of Palestine in accordance with its own platform, as 145 of 193 United Nations member countries have already done. Not only did Albanese lose the senator to the crossbench in July, he also validated Dutton’s relentless claims that Government MPs and senators were not united when it came to protecting Australians from a wave of alleged Palestinian terrorists and criminals coming into our country from Gaza, even though none were coming.

Dutton’s hyper-adversarial pronouncements are delivered with supreme certitude and get blanket coverage by a Coalition-friendly legacy media. They prompt the Government to look and sound indecisive as Albanese searches for ways to respond to his opponent’s demands rather than take firm stands on principle. Dutton’s Trumpian rhetoric makes an impact, with an Essential poll showing on Tuesday that 44 percent of Australians agree with Dutton’s call for a refugee pause even though the Rafah border crossing is closed. The media adds to the confusion by reporting his alarmist rhetoric, largely uncontested.

Even though Australian elections are unlike American presidential elections, leadership will be a real factor in a 2025 election that might turn on a small margin, and Albanese’s vacillating style is a serious liability against an opponent who will say anything and sound certain when he says it. Against a background in which Kamala Harris has been successfully jettisoned into the role of US presidential candidate for an election in three months, the forthright leadership talents and communication credentials of Tony Burke, Clare O’Neil, Jason Clare and Jim Chalmers are increasingly discussed at the dinner tables of unhappy Labor supporters.

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