Five days until the Australian election day and things are heating up: TLDR Election 2025
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Spectator
2 days ago
- Spectator
Labour is going to have to leave the ECHR
The Home Secretary's extension of the list of countries covered by the 'deport now, appeal later' scheme for foreign criminals, announced this morning, doesn't actually add to the number of undesirables that we can deport. But it could lubricate the process of getting rid of them. For criminals from the new countries just added, which include a number of African and Asian states, India, Canada and Australia, it means that once the Home Secretary rejects an objection based on human rights grounds, physical removal can be automatic. The deportee can still appeal, but any appeal has to be pursued from abroad. This not only saves us the cost of supporting and detaining them here but reduces the possibility of them either disappearing into the black economy, or arguing that the passage of time has itself created of a link with this country so strong as to make their removal inhuman. This is a step in the right direction. But it is a pretty limited one. There are 700-odd prisoners from the new countries in our jails who will be subject to the new rules; but this is around half the number who come from Albania alone, which tops the list of foreign suppliers of convicts to our penal system and which was already part of the scheme even before its extension. One doubts whether extended human rights claims against removal by, say, unwanted Canadians or Australians are a serious problem. By contrast, we have large numbers of Polish, Romanian, Lithuanian, Jamaican, Pakistani and Somali jailbirds on our hands whom we would love to be summarily rid of, but are still not covered. Tough-sounding measures of this kind are all very well. But they have a history of coming unstuck. We have been here before. Legislation in 2014 would have allowed all deported criminals to be put on the first plane out and then appeal from abroad. Unfortunately this very salutary provision was declared non-human-rights-compliant three years later by a liberal Supreme Court unhappy about the difficulties faced by criminal deportees forced into long-distance litigation. The present scheme aims to sidestep this by requiring provisions for pursuing effective online appeals from abroad: countries are not added unless and until these have been agreed. But it would be foolish to rule out a UK court, or the European Court of Human Rights, saying that an applicant has not had a chance to put his case. We also cannot exclude a court staying physical expulsion on the basis that the trauma of immediate removal, say of a criminal with alleged mental health issues, is itself a breach of human rights. This is, in other words, largely an exercise in tinkering. Furthermore, even if it works it will not make a serious dent in the numbers of foreigners who successfully demand to stay despite having grossly abused our hospitality. To do this, the government knows perfectly well about the migrant elephant in the room. In the last resort something must be done about the European Convention on Human Rights. Whether litigation takes place in the Strand or in the legal ether over a Zoom link from abroad is largely beside the point: even where a person otherwise fulfils the criteria for removal, it always remains open under the Convention to argue that if removed their family life would be destroyed, or that they would face ill-treatment abroad. (Some, indeed, have successfully, if impudently, resisted removal precisely because of the hostility they would face at home as a result of their having committed a heinous crime here.) This cannot go on. I can quite legitimately eject someone from my house who has taken sanctuary there if they start smashing up my furniture, even if I know a baying mob outside will brutalise them as a result. The same should go for a country: the right to refuge, even from those out for blood, should be able to be lost as a result of serious misbehaviour. Unfortunately this is what Strasbourg, with its almost religious view of human rights, will not accept. In the end, there is only one way out. Barring a Damascene conversion of the Strasbourg court, something pretty inconceivable (witness its petulant brush-off three months ago of a suggestion from a number of countries including Denmark, Poland and Italy that it should soften its line on migrants' rights), withdrawal is fast becoming not only an option, but the only option. A number of Red Wall MPs, painfully aware of public opinion, are already making noises along these lines. For the moment this is anathema to Yvette Cooper, and even more so to Keir Starmer and Lord Hermer. But sooner or later Labour, if it wants to avoid electoral irrelevance, will have to think seriously about it.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- The Guardian
Dutton blaming migrants for housing crisis ‘undermined' Coalition at election, Andrew Bragg says
Blaming migrants for housing shortages in Australia alienated voters and badly hurt Peter Dutton's prospects at the federal election, the Coalition frontbencher Andrew Bragg has warned. The housing crisis and record overseas migration were key issues for voters ahead of the 3 May poll. But Bragg, the shadow minister for housing and homelessness, said the Coalition paid a heavy price for misjudging the politics. The Liberal vote collapsed, leaving Labor with 94 seats in the House of Representatives and a huge majority. Sign up: AU Breaking News email 'Someone said to me, 'if you're a migrant, you got blamed for the housing crisis. If your parent was a dual national, you could get deported.' And that wasn't a very good starting point for our campaign,' Bragg said. 'It's just not what we're wanting to achieve.' Bragg made the comments in an interview for the Guardian's Australian Politics podcast, released on Friday. 'We're not wanting to make people feel unwelcome,' he said. 'I'm the child of a migrant myself. 'We love multicultural Australia. A lot of us do a huge amount of engagement with multicultural communities, and it's just a real shame that some of those positions were taken and that some of that engagement was really undermined.' Bragg criticised Labor for failing to build more houses in its first three years in office, blaming red tape, a drop in housing construction rates and steep population growth for exacerbating the crisis. Sorry your browser does not support audio - but you can download here and listen $ He warned the federal government against intervening in the responsibilities of state and local governments on housing, suggesting commonwealth-state financial arrangements, the National Construction Code and financial incentives should be the focus. 'Ultimately, if they're going to pretend that they are the state government, and they have a planning power, then that would be a fool's errand,' he said. 'They need to focus on what they can control.' Bragg conceded it was a mistake for the Coalition not to put forward a homelessness policy before the election, promising to do so ahead of the 2028 poll. 'The starting point here on homelessness is you need to build more houses, otherwise you fuel the crisis. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion 'Right now, under this government, we have the highest level of homelessness on record. The fact that the government talk about all their housing bureaucracies doesn't actually yield any results. I mean, what matters is actually building houses.' The housing minister, Clare O'Neil, told ABC radio on Friday Labor remained committed to its target for 1.2m new homes to be built nationally by mid-2029, despite warnings from industry and Treasury that that number could be out of reach. 'I'm doing every single thing that I can as housing minister, federally, to make sure that we meet the target or get as close to it as we can,' O'Neil said. The federal government itself aims to build 55,000 social and affordable homes by mid-2029. About 2,000 are finished and about 28,000 are in planning or construction. 'The target will depend on lots of different things: it will depend on what state governments do,' O'Neil said. 'It will depend on what interest rates look like. But what I can tell you is that having a big, difficult target is exactly the kind of thinking that is going to need to snap us out of what is a 40-year-old problem confronting our country.'
The Guardian
03-08-2025
- The Guardian
Young Liberals urge Coalition to distance itself from Sky News and blame Maga ‘mirage' for Dutton loss
The Young Liberals want the Coalition to distance itself from Sky News and appeal to voters through a wider variety of media outlets, blaming Donald Trump-style culture wars for Peter Dutton's historic election rout. In a submission to the party's election postmortem, obtained by Guardian Australia, the New South Wales Young Liberals division said the 'fringe right' of the Liberal membership had too much influence over policy and campaign media, causing 'a mirage of the Maga movement' which turned off women and multicultural voters. The 31-page assessment, handed to the review being led by Liberal elders Pru Goward and Nick Minchin, is scathing of the campaign run by Dutton and his frontbench team, describing them as badly outplayed by Labor and out of touch with traditional Liberal constituencies. The document has not been released publicly and was provided to Guardian on the condition of anonymity. 'The 2025 election proved that being one of the loudest media voices in the room does not mean voters are listening to you,' it said. 'Viewership data shows that most Australians do not engage with overtly political commentary on traditional media, such as evening commentators on Sky News. Yet much of our party's policy agenda and media appearances during the campaign were stuck in a conservative echo-chamber.' Sign up: AU Breaking News email Labor won 94 seats, its biggest victory in decades, while the Coalition was reduced to 43 seats in the lower house. Pointing to Dutton directly, the submission said the parliamentary leader must 'front up' to a range of media outlets, including those not considered 'traditionally friendly' to the Liberal and Nationals parties. Ahead of his 3 May defeat, Dutton did the opposite. He was criticised for not regularly fronting the Canberra press gallery in the lead-up to the campaign and dubbed the ABC and Guardian 'hate media' in the final days before the poll. The Young Liberals called out senior figures for demonising Chinese-Australians and exacerbating division related to war in the Middle East. Frontbencher Jacinta Nampijinpa Price was criticised for declaring a Dutton government would 'make Australia great again,' echoing Trump's slogan just as the Coalition was trying to distance itself from the unpopular US president's policies and rhetoric. 'The Coalition must refrain from pursuing culture war issues and respect the intelligence of the Australian people by formulating nuanced, meaningful policy,' it said. On promises to voters, the submission was equally downcast. It said major policies should be announced with more lead time and accompanied by sufficient costings detail. It criticised Dutton's signature plan for development of nuclear power in Australia, and the decision to oppose Labor's tax cuts. 'Coalition policies such as the promise to cut 40,000 public service jobs, Peter Dutton's refusal to stand before the Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander flags, and a crackdown on 'woke' culture in schools all reinforced the perception of a party more interested in symbolic battles than addressing serious domestic and international issues,' it said. The opposition leader, Sussan Ley, has commissioned Minchin and Goward to assess the loss, and ordered a second review into the Liberal party's structure. One question being considered is how to boost female representation in Coalition ranks. The Young Liberals have called for a 2015 party review to be implemented, including an aspirational national target for 50-50 gender parity in parliament, but suggested Labor-style quotas could be required. 'Ultimately, the Liberal Party doesn't look like modern Australia. Australians notice, and it matters,' the submission said. Submissions to the review were due by Friday, with a report expected by the end of the year.
