The Federal Elections

The Australian Federal Elections were held a couple of weeks ago. The incumbent government was re-elected.

The last couple of days before election day were very surreal. One of the problems Australia deals with are boatloads of illegal immigrants who sail to Australia's northern coasts and islands. Every week a new boat sets sail from Indonesia full of Pakistanis, Iraqis, and others. The boats are not seaworthy enough to make the voyage of most often flounder and sink. The Aussie navy ends up rescuing them, or what is left of them.

The goal of the boat people is to set foot on Christmas Island. It is a tiny tropical island northwest of Australia way out in the Indian Ocean. It has the feature of being the closest Australian territory to Indonesia. Once the boat people step foot on the island, they claim political asylum and then manage to milk the asylum system for years of time in Australia.

It has been become a game. The navy does everything they can to keep these boats from making landfall, and the smugglers do everything they can to set foot on Australian territory. The latest trick is to allow the navy to approach the boat, then scuttle it causing everyone to end up on the middle of the ocean. The navy then has no choice but to rescue them.

Good idea, except half these people can't swim. So usually a couple drown in the process. Considering that some boats don't have the luck of sinking in front of an Australian navy boat and nearly everyone drowns, perhaps they consider themselves lucky.

So the navy now rushes over with a small boat to prevent the crew from sinking the boat. The crew fights with the navy sailors to keep them from boarding until the boat can sink.

To prevent the navy from keeping the boats from sinking, they have taken to setting the boats on fire. A couple of weeks ago this was attempted with disastrous results. It seems that the one refugee woman who was in charge of setting the boat on fire when the navy showed up had failed to buy a copy of "Arson for Dummies" before leaving Iraq. She failed to understand the fine art of setting of fire that burns hot and fast enough to destroy the target, but not the surrounding assets. She saw the barrel of gasoline on the deck, and when the navy ship was spotted, threw a match in it. As you can guess, the boat was destroyed, along with most everyone of board.

Now getting back to the elections. Australians are a very secular people. It is difficult get get citizenship, or a visa here. The unions don't carry enormous political weight, and they don't want any non-union people doing an Australian's job. These boat people really distress them. It is the perfect political issue and the ruling Social Liberal Party made is the centerpiece of their campaign.

As the election got closer, the challenging Labour Party started to make headway. They started promising cash for each family that had a baby, promises of beds in the state retirement homes for when you get old, and job protection issues such a preventing the privatization of the national airlines.

Three days before the election there was another boat people crisis off Christmas Island. This time the navy reported that the adults on board were throwing the children overboard in to ocean. There was no information to go with the news. The Howard government seized on the issue to demonstrate that this crisis had gotten out of hand and that they were the best party to deal with it. The navy then reversed it's story claiming they don't know what happened on the boat, and the boat sank anyways.

The press, never to let facts get in the way of a good story, took the idea and ran with it. For the last few days before the election all the media talked about was if the boat people were throwing children off the boat and why the navy claimed they did. The press got hold of a bad home video that was shot from the navy ship as they approached. The video shows nothing but a bunch of people running around a sinking boat. The reporters insinuated that the navy manufactured the story to help the Howard government.

No matter if it was true or manufactured, it did the job. All the other issues were swept aside as the newspapers and television reporters argued over the details of the video tape and if the head of the navy should loose his job over this.

I mention this because I was very impressed with the skill that the Howard government deployed in the last days. This incident landed like a gift from heaven into their laps and they plaid the media outlets like a violin. The opposition was completely outclassed and outgunned. The best American political advisors would be so proud.

I spoke to a few people since then about the election and they all seem to have a consistent answer to why they voted for Howard. They all feel that in time of crisis since Sept 11th that they don't want to change governments. They feel things are going ok for Australia considering how bad things are in the rest of the world, so why mess with it?

The brilliance of the Howard campaign seizing this boat issue is that it kept the other party from being heard enough to change minds. The labor party had an uphill battle anyways, and the Liberal Party simple keep the agenda on their turf.