No mercy. How it’s going to be until the next election

Joe Biden attended the first two but skipped Bangkok so he could attend his granddaughter’s wedding. He sent Vice-President Kamala Harris to APEC instead.

Similarly, Biden pulled out at the last minute from attending the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue in Sydney in May to stay home and sort out the deadlock in Congress over the debt ceiling.

Domestic issues are important, and Biden made a choice. In deciding not to skip APEC, so did Albanese and, in doing so, the longstanding bipartisan support for prime ministerial travel was shattered.

For months, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has been dropping the odd bon mot to tap into voter discomfort with a frequently absent prime minister.

On Wednesday, he gave up all pretence and demanded outright that the PM abort his trip to the US and stay home to deal with both the rise of antisemitism in Australia, and the release from immigration detention of more than 84 “hardened criminals” following last week’s High Court decision.

It was a massive stretch to conflate the two issues and was not helpful in terms of trying to maintain social cohesion on the back of the latest Israel-Arab conflict.

In a speech to the caucus on Tuesday, Albanese made the salient point that Australia, in terms of being able to influence events in the Middle-East, had bugger-all clout.

Sometimes, to make a point, you have to drop a big rock in the pond, and that was Dutton’s tactic.

With the pro-Palestinian Greens and pro-Israeli Coalition both seeking political profit, the government’s priority, he said, must be to empathise with victims in both camps and calm domestic tensions.

In doing what he did, however, Dutton blew up the joint and elicited the angriest response from the Prime Minister since he took office.

Albanese was still shaking with anger after question time at what he deemed to be Dutton’s temerity.

During that skirmish, both men gave as good as they got and ultimately appealed to their respective constituencies, and thus, Dutton was unperturbed by the condemnation that came his way from Albanese and sections of the commentariat.

Sometimes, to make a point, you have to drop a big rock in the pond, and that was his tactic – to drive home growing perceptions among suburban and regional voters – that the PM, via his months-long campaigning for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, and his frequent absenteeism, was becoming increasingly detached from suburban and regional voters.

It’s not true, but the perception is growing, and perception in politics is almost everything.

“It’s coming up in our research; wrong priorities, [Albanese’s] not focused on us,” said a Liberal strategist.

By Thursday, as Dutton was doubling down on his criticism of the PM for being abroad while, supposedly, hordes of murderers and rapists roamed the streets, the government had been forced to reconfigure the parliamentary agenda to rush through stopgap legislation to respond to the High Court decision.

Not since Scott Morrison declared a national emergency over a few needles in strawberries and rammed through legislation imposing tough penalties, has the parliament been subject to such rude haste.

On Thursday, curfews, monitoring controls and jail terms for visa breaches were added to the conditions already imposed on those released by the court. The Coalition demanded amendments, and Labor accepted them.

Yet, it had been over a week since the High Court ruled it illegal to indefinitely detain non-citizens who can’t be deported, after hearing the case of a detained Rohingya man who was a convicted child sex abuser but with no prospect of repatriation to Myanmar.

In the interim, the government said it was doing all it could, in co-operation with the states, to ensure community safety, but contended it could not legislate a response until the High Court published its reasons.

The pressure brought to bear by the opposition, talkback radio and breakfast television changed all that and, once more, Labor backbenchers were scratching their heads at how flatfooted the leadership had been.

Why, they asked, had the government not been ready with a legislated response so it could move immediately in the event of losing the case?

“No doubt, we should have had a response ready to roll,” said one MP.

Instead, it allowed itself to be boxed around the ears for a week by the opposition and the tabloid media before being made to look reactionary.

Even during this period, when the government was clearly looking at options, its obsession with secrecy and its growing disdain for transparency meant it refused to answer even basic, harmless questions from journalists about what it was considering.

Instead, all we got were smug answers, such as this from Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus on Monday in response to a detailed question: “As a government, we will do all that is necessary to keep the Australian community safe.”

This attitude made the hole even bigger for Dutton to drive through and ultimately claim victory following what was, in large part, a confected crisis.

“The government had the ability in June … to be able to respond by way of legislation or other administrative changes to deal with this very real threat to the Australian community,” Dutton told parliament as the bill sailed through the lower house on Thursday.

“So, was legislation drafted in June? Was it drafted in July? Was it drafted in August? Was it drafted in September or October? It wasn’t even drafted 24 hours ago.”

It was Labor’s nightmare and Dutton’s fantasy to be again fighting on immigration issues.

Moreover, it was Dutton signalling that this is how it’s going to be over the next 12 to 18 months before the election. No mercy.

Phillip Coorey is political editor of The Australian Financial Review