For his latest slogan, Tony Abbott appears to have gone back more than 40 years, and to just a miserly two words: Not Yet.
This was the dismal and self-defeating exhortation that adorned Liberal Party t-shirts in response to Gough Whitlam’s triumphant 1972 “It’s Time” campaign. Needless to say, it was a disastrous failure.
But Tony Abbott will not learn. He has already tried the formula many times: even when an outcome has been clear to all, he has often sought to postpone it. He clung to his personal Parental Leave Scheme long after it had become unacceptable to the public and, more importantly, to his own parliamentary colleagues.
More recently he stuck to Bronwyn Bishop for weeks, although she was clearly a terminal liability from the moment her helicopter excursion had become a national joke.
And now our procrastinating Prime Minister has done it again: his knee-jerk reaction to the wave of international sympathy to the plight of the Syrian displacement of refugees, triggered in particular by the harrowing photograph of the corpse of four-year-old Aylan Kurdi washed ashore on a beach, has been to temporise and delay.
Certainly, he said it was time for Australians to step up to the plate; but he added immediately that while Syrian refugees would become a larger proportion of the Australian intake, there would be no overall increase. It sounded callous and mean-spirited and it was bound, sooner or later, to lead to a retraction.
It was partly just that Abbott was following the habit of a lifetime: if the opposition was in favour of a proposition, then he was against it. No ifs, no buts, no debate. It is, as he likes to say, in his DNA. So the moment that Labor suggested a one-off boost to the numbers of 10,000 and the Greens upped the ante to 20,000, Abbott’s reflexive reply was: nope, nope, nope.
But the point is that it was not only the Opposition this time: many in his own party room were speaking out, and even his close friend and ally, the popular NSW premier Mike Baird, was prominent in urging a one-off boost to the numbers.
Within 48 hours, Abbott – or at least those on his behalf – were backtracking: well, let’s see what happens, let’s wait until we hear from Peter Dutton when he talks to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees in Geneva.
But this was a distraction and a transparent one; it was probably a good idea to dispatch the combative Minister for Immigration and Border Protection to Switzerland – it would probably be a good idea to dispatch him almost anywhere, for that matter.
But Abbott has spent years denigrating and dismissing any criticism, advice and even pleading from the UNHCR; he has said repeatedly that decisions for refugees and asylum seekers were matters for Australia and for Australia alone. We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.
For Abbott to now turn to the UNHCR for succor was not only buck-passing but utterly unconvincing. In the end, the decision had to be his, and it has been based not on international pressure, but on domestic politics: and given the mood of the voters, there was little doubt what it would be.
But in the meantime, Abbott squandered an opportunity. What might have been a spontaneous, compassionate and generous gesture became just another calculated, poll-driven decision governed by self-interest. The overall impression was that Abbott was not stepping up to the plate; he had to be dragged to it kicking and screaming – not It’s Time, but Not Yet.
Even before the dim past of 1972, there used to be an undistinguished South Australian backbencher named Geoffrey O’Halloran Giles. His long parliamentary career would have been totally forgotten except for one wonderful line: “The government, in due course, acted promptly.”
Too wordy for a slogan, perhaps, but Tony Abbott may well have adopted it as his personal mantra.
Mungo MacCallum is a political journalist and commentator.
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