It was September 2015 and the then Immigration minister Peter Dutton was waiting for a meeting to start at Parliament House, with then prime minister Tony Abbott and then Social Services minister Scott Morrison.
With the television cameras rolling, the three had some "light hearted" sotto voce banter about the late arrival of some of the attendees.
Dutton, apparently referring to Indigenous punctuality in north Queensland, remarked to his colleagues, "It's Cape York time". Mr Abbott laughed and said something similar had occurred at a South Pacific Forum meeting with Pacific nations the previous day in Papua New Guinea.
"Time doesn't mean anything when ... you're about to have water lapping at your door," Dutton responded, eliciting more laughs from the PM... until Morrison pointed out that there was a boom microphone hovering above their heads — which of course famously had picked up the entire exchange.
Dutton's comments — reflecting a spectacular disdain for the existential threat many Pacific nations feel from climate change — came to mind on Friday.
On morning television, he dismissed suggestions that the revelation that Solomon Islands was negotiating a security deal with China — which might eventually lead to a Chinese naval base being established in the small nation — meant the government had "dropped the ball" in the Pacific.
"We have a fantastic relationship with the Solomon Islands and we're there at the request of the government of the Solomon Islands at the moment," Dutton said. "We have 50 people on the ground and they're going to stay there in the run-up to 2023. There's a lot more we can do for them."
He went on: "As part of the Pacific family, it is obvious we want to work together and we want to resolve any issues within that family, within our region. And we would be concerned clearly about any military base being established and we would express that to the Solomon Islands' government."
Well, yes, such a fantastic relationship that Canberra only found out that Honiara had signed a policing agreement with Beijing — and was now working on a much more comprehensive arrangement that included the military — a couple of weeks ago.
If we were even slightly good at just being patronising...
Let's just put what is happening in the Pacific at the moment into perspective. One of the strategic reasons given for why we want to now move to nuclear submarines, and spend billions of dollars doing it, is that they can be stationed a lot further "forward" in the South China Sea than is currently the case. That is, they can stay up near China for long stretches of time as a vital part of our forward defences.
This is a really great strategy — as long as the Chinese navy hasn't already got a lot closer to Australia by establishing naval bases in, amongst other places, Solomon Islands (just over 3,000km away) or even potentially in PNG on the island of Daru (about 200km away over the Torres Strait), as noted in this column in December 2020.
A new economic superpower in the region was always going to be hard to deal with, but perhaps if we were even slightly good at just being patronising, we might not be facing quite such an alarming development in what we patronisingly refer to our as backyard just now.
Compared to the mega spend on submarines, our Pacific neighbours are supposed to be impressed by the government last year announcing an extra $500 million to a $3 billion regional infrastructure plan as a sign that Australia was "a reliable and steady member of the Pacific family".
It is hard not to see that disdain for climate change — which had powerful ripple effects in the Pacific's attitude to Australia — as part of a pattern of our regional relationships being driven much too heavily by domestic politics in the past decade, instead of strategic interest.
'Secret' asylum seeker deal revealed
Dutton's remarks in 2015, of course, were made at the peak of the Coalition's refusal to do anything meaningful about climate change, and to wear this as a badge of honour in a political sense.
And this week we have seen another issue that has been completely captured and defined by domestic politics finally start to be resolved.
For almost a decade, there has been a deal in place which would have allowed some of those asylum seekers who arrived in Australia by boat to be resettled in New Zealand.
But the Prime Minister and his colleagues have stubbornly refused to pursue it, publicly arguing such a deal would restart boat arrivals or be used as a back door for people wanting to enter Australia (that would be all 150 of them a year for the next three years).
There was much focus at week's end on the "secret deal" independent Senator Jacquie Lambie had done with the government in 2019, in which she agreed to support the so-called Medevac legislation in order to get this agreement finally acted upon.
But 450 people over three years leaves a lot of people in the horrific limbo Australia has created for them. The NZ deal might clear Nauru, and some of the people who are back on the mainland. But it won't of itself help the hundred-odd men stuck in Papua New Guinea. The fate of somewhere between 600 and 700 people remains uncertain.
Whether the government's announcement this week is driven by a responsibility to honour a deal with Lambie, or by a wish to clear the slate when the government is under threat from independents in a range of seats about issues like this, is hard to tell.
But a week or so out from the election campaign officially beginning, the government doesn't seem to have a lot left in its political ammunition cabinet. The Solomon Islands revelations are but another challenge to its claims of superior national security and defence management.
The election campaign is going to get ugly
Trying to decipher a clear fiscal strategy from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg's remarks about next week's budget is equally unhelpful politically.
Already there is a sense that all the government has left, in a world where polls tell us the PM's reputation with voters is ... not in a good place, is to try to tear down the Opposition Leader's reputation.
Scott Morrison took part in spending announcements around the country this week that amounted to a not insubstantial sum of around $8 billion.
Yet he seemed to get as much coverage for commenting on Anthony Albanese's weight loss, or denying he has been at the Hillsong Church for 15 years, when there are pictures of him leading prayer next to its now disgraced leader Brian Houston at the Church's conference in 2019.
It is going to be an ugly, personal election campaign.
But if you think about it, the issues and edifices that have defined and constrained our politics for the past decade — "debt and deficits", asylum seekers, climate change — are all crumbling into dust just now. Not because of any great leadership but because events in the world are simply overtaking us — and the issues.
They may be discussed sotto voce in the election campaign. But you may need a boom mic to pick them up.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMicWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIyLTAzLTI2L3NvbG9tb24taXNsYW5kcy1zZWN1cml0eS1sYW1iaWUtbWVkZXZhYy1kZWFsLWdvdmVybm1lbnQtZWxlY3Rpb24vMTAwOTQwNzM20gEA?oc=5
2022-03-25 18:00:00Z
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