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Armchair_Politician
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LABOR is paying the price for promoting a pathetically childish morality that cares more about seeming good, not doing it.
Its election campaign has been derailed as Labor candidate after candidate has been outed as hostile to our border laws.
At least 17 now have been revealed as critical of the Abbott government policies that actually stopped the boats and saved hundreds of lives.
Worse for Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, they have been hostile to the boat policies he claims he will not change if he wins the election.
Yeah, right, voters will say. As if.
Yeah, right, agrees Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull — himself an expert on moral posturing and turning on a dime.
On Saturday, Peta Murphy, Labor’s candidate in Dunkley, became just the latest to embarrass Shorten, this time on national security laws as well.
She was exposed as having been a committee member of an activist lawyers’ group which attacked our terror laws and even complained that the mass-murdering Islamist al-Shabaah had been listed as a terrorist group.
Now meet today’s exhibit: Marg D’Arcy, Labor’s candidate for Kooyong.
D’Arcy three years ago suggested we actually “sponsor asylum seekers to get on safe boats” to Australia, and last year tweeted to the ABC’s Q & A that ‘Stopping boats is not answer [sic]”.
In fact, she insisted, “it was reckless to talk about turning back boats” — which is now Labor’s official policy. In fact, Shorten says Labor even reserves the “option” of boat turnbacks.
But who cares about Shorten, right? As D’Arcy sniffily tweeted when Shorten helped to sack her beloved prime minister, Julia Gillard, he just “blows with the wind”.
I do feel a flicker of sympathy for Shorten, who, urged on by his cluey immigration spokesman, Richard Marles, did belatedly declare last year that Labor had learned its lesson from its catastrophic decision in 2008 to scrap our tough border controls.
Shorten said he would not repeat what the preening prime minister Kevin Rudd did back then — weaken our laws on the alleged grounds they lacked “compassion”.
Most press gallery journalists had cheered Rudd’s catastrophic mistake. The Age even crooned then that “a stain was removed from the soul of this nation” and “Australia began the process of restoring some of its lost humanity”.
But check the price of Labor’s “compassion”: 1200 men, women and children drowned as they tried to sail here to claim Labor’s prize of a warm welcome. Another 50,000 illegal immigrants did manage to land, many taking the places of genuine refugees, and taxpayers were forced to pay $12 billion to deal with them.
In the end, this armada was eventually bringing in thousands of people from Iran and Sri Lanka, neither country notably unsafe, and even some from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Myanmar and Nepal.
In the meantime, we have been reminded of the savage cost of admitting people we should have kept out. The last three terrorist attacks here — the Martin Place siege, the shooting of police accountant Curtis Cheng and the stabbing of two police in Melbourne — were all committed by Muslim “refugees” or their children.
Yet all this brutal reality — so overwhelmingly obvious — has made zero impression on the thinking of many of the Left.
The consequences of their moral posturing are irrelevant to them.
It seems that a few hundred drowned children is a small price to pay for the satisfaction the Left gets of seeming holier-than-thou.
Children must drown so that Mr Activist may seem good.
But as I say, I almost feel sorry for Shorten, because he at least finally forced his party to do what it should have done nearly a decade ago — back the kind of laws that it took Tony Abbott to restore.
Yet Labor’s years of sanctimony had meanwhile helped to breed a new generation of Labor candidates who no longer cared that what counts most in a politician is not what they feel but what they do.
Not what they planned, but what they achieved.
And so poor Shorten had the first week of this election campaign knocked sideways by a conga-line of people just like D’Arcy.
It started with his candidate in Melbourne, Sophie Ismail, who said she was against boat turnbacks — and even won moral support from Shorten’s chief rival, frontbencher Anthony Albanese.
It got worse by the day.
Next was Cathy O’Toole, Labor’s candidate in the marginal seat of Herbert, who had been photographed earlier this year holding a “Let them stay” sign in protest against boat people being sent to Nauru.
Then there was Michael Freelander, Labor’s candidate in the Sydney marginal seat of Macarthur, who likened the detention centre at Manus Island to a “concentration camp” and falsely claimed that this men-only centre was used to “torture” children.
Knock, knock, Michael. Boat people “tortured” at this “concentration camp” have an option no Jew in Auschwitz ever got: they can just decide to go back home, or even to Cambodia or Papua New Guinea, and the government will open the gates and even fill their pockets with our money.
But on it went. Luke Gosling, the candidate in the Darwin seat of Solomon, and Fremantle candidate Josh Wilson were the next to have been pictured at protests against sending boat people to Nauru.
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