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ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack. This is 7am.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton may have found the message he could take to the federal election: stopping the boats.

It hasn’t been at the top of the agenda for years, but a couple of weeks ago a boat arriving in far northern WA gave him an opportunity to put the issue back on the front page.

Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper Mike Seccombe fact checks Peter Dutton’s media blitz and his claims about asylum seekers.

It’s Tuesday, February 27.

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ANGE:

Mike, we're going to look at how the debate on Australia's borders has flared up in politics because of this boat arrival in WA a few weeks ago. Before we get to that reaction, what do we know about the asylum seekers and how they arrived?

MIKE:

Well, you're quite right. It's been a political firestorm. And it was really quite a little spark when you look at it, that ignited the whole thing. So what happened was earlier this month, on a Friday afternoon in the remote Western Australian community of Beagle Bay, which is about 150km from Broome, a community with fewer than 400 people, they noticed when about a group of about 30 asylum seekers arrived, dehydrated, disoriented, and then a couple of hours later, a second group arrived of a dozen or so, walked into a camp campsite about 50km away from where the first group was found. But they appear to have come off the same boat.

Audio excerpt – WA resident:

“I didn't have a clue where they were or what they're doing and what's going on, so we just took them home and gave them a feed and, yeah, they just said they were meant to land at Darwin. But yeah, when I showed them on a map, they were wanting to go to Sydney.”

MIKE:

And a tourism operator in Pender Bay had discovered the man, apparently because his dogs, Marley and Smokey, were barking. And so, he went out and he found them. He spoke to reporters and said that his dogs were actually the front line of Australia's border security, and they needed a pay rise.

So in total, we have, you know, 40 odd, people believed to be from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. They spent a few hours with the local Aboriginal community, until the police and border officials arrived.

Audio excerpt – Reporter 1:

“They have, in the last few minutes, been transported into this local primary school facility where you can see behind me, the men are seated in the shade. Border force are now on the scene, and it appears that they are trying to speak with the men one by one, we're guessing to understand the circumstances in which they've arrived in Australia.”

MIKE:

And they've since been whisked off to offshore detention on Nauru.

It's worth pointing out how rare this boat arrival is. In recent years, there have been a very low number of boats arriving here, only four boats in Australia, in 2023. And, what's remarkable about this arrival isn't just how surprising it was to the community, but that they managed to slip right past Operation Sovereign Borders. You know, the system by which we surveil our coastline. But even more surprising is just how quickly and intensely it was seized upon by politicians, particularly the opposition leader Peter Dutton.

ANGE:

And so, how did Peter Dutton react to this boat arrival? What did he say?

MIKE:

Well, he has managed to absolutely flood certain sections of the media.

Audio excerpt – Ben Fordham:

“Border protection is going to be a hot topic today. The arrival of more than 40 asylum seekers on our shores has reignited a fierce debate. Does Labour have what it takes to stop the boats?”

MIKE:

Particularly conservative talkback shows, like radio 2GB in Sydney,

Audio excerpt – Ben Fordham:

“And the opposition leader joins us live. Peter Dutton, good morning to you.”

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“Good morning Ben.”

MIKE:

Morning television shows like Today and Sunrise.

Audio excerpt – Natalie Barr:

“Opposition Leader Peter Dutton joins me now. Good morning to you, Mr. Dutton. So the boat arrived undetected, on our shores, with no warning.”

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“Morning Nat.”

MIKE:

And over and over in this process, of course, Dutton has sought to blame the Albanese government for the arrival of this boat, taking the opportunity to call the Albanese government weak on borders.

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“Anthony Albanese’s never believed in border protection or operation sovereign borders. That's the reality from, you know, many years in government and opposition.”

MIKE:

And said that as a result of this weakness, we would end up with, quote, an armada, unquote, of boats coming to Australia.

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“We'll end up with an armada of boats, and that’s the last thing anybody wants.”

MIKE:

As part of this blitz of morning television and talkback, he made a number of claims about where the failures lay. And I'd like to look at two of them in particular.

The first claim is that Labour had gutted spending on border security.

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton, Sunrise:

“The fact that they’ve cut about $600 million out of border force.”

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton, Today:

“They’ve ripped $600 million dollars out of Operation Sovereign Borders.”

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton, 2GB:

“The money was taken from Border Force and there’s a consequence that you pay for that.”

MIKE:

The second thing that he did was he blamed the Albanese government, for making changes to temporary protection visas

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton, Sunrise:

“They've closed down one of the important legs of Operation Sovereign Borders, which is temporary protection visas.”

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton, Today:

“Firstly they've abolished the temporary protection visas.”

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton, 2GB:

“And by taking the temporary protection visa off the table, people know that once the protection is… once a permanent protection visa is issued, it's essentially a fait accompli that people will go onto citizenship.”

MIKE:

Saying that that also made us more attractive to would be asylum seekers.

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton, 2GB:

“These are all messages that the people smugglers will push.”

MIKE:

And thanks to a concerted effort by the opposition leader and various other members of his opposition, these claims travelled around the media at incredible speed.

ANGE:

Right. So it sounds like Peter Dutton has used his boat arrival as an opportunity to attack Labour and maybe score some political points, but how accurate are the claims Peter Dutton made about funding and about protection visas?

MIKE:

Well, in both these cases, the truth tells a very different story. In effect, they were disinformation. They weren't right at all. So, let's start with the Border Force funding, the claim that $600 million has been ripped out. As Dutton was doing his big media blitz, the head of the Australian Border Force, Michael Outram, released a statement which basically debunks all that he was saying. Outram said that contrary to losing funding, Border Force funding is actually at the highest level it's been since it was established in 2015. Not only that, he said, in the last year, the Australian Border Force had received additional funding totalling hundreds of millions of dollars. So Dutton isn't just wrong, he’s well over $1 billion worth of wrong. Now, if we go to the other key claim, about temporary protection visas, that's also not true. I spoke to Daniel Ghezelbash, who's the deputy director of New South Wales Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, and got him to explain what the changes to the temporary protection visa regime meant. And he says that, yes, the change has allowed a limited cohort of people who had arrived in Australia more than ten years ago, that is, before Operation Sovereign Borders started and who had been found to be genuine refugees but were stuck on this cycle of short term protection visas, as he said year after year, the change simply allows them to apply for a permanent protection visa. And as he said to me, for anyone who arrived after January 1st, 2014, the TPV policy change is entirely irrelevant. It does not apply, unquote.

So Ange, you know, telling lies in politics is one thing, but spreading such demonstrably false claims could actually have an unintended consequence. A number of immigration experts have actually warned us that these claims could have the opposite affect that Dutton intends, and that they could actually increase the number of people trying to get to Australia by boat.

ANGE:

After the break, the claim Peter Dutton made about Border Security that’s actually true.

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ANGE:

Mike, you mentioned that there are concerns that this weak on border rhetoric we've seen from the opposition leader is not only based on misleading claims, but could actually lead to an increase in boat arrivals. What's that argument based on?

MIKE:

Well, these experts argue that spreading the idea that Australia's borders have become more porous under Labour, acts as a pull factor. That is, it encourages more people to try, on the basis that they think they might make it. And the most damning criticism, I think, came actually from the commander of the Sovereign Borders Joint Agency Task Force, Rear Admiral Brett Sonter, I mean, bear in mind here, he's an apolitical government servant. Sonter totally dismissed any claims that Australia's border security had been weakened by any policy change. And I'll quote him too, any alternate narrative will be exploited by criminal people smugglers to deceive potential irregular immigrants and convince them to risk their lives and travel to Australia by boat. So, the incredible thing about this is that the Rear Admiral said this on Friday, so it was before Dutton's media blitz. But Dutton just went out there and kept spreading the untruths about border security being weaker. Then there's the fact, of course, that various other people have pointed out that Dutton's own record on border security was, well, not good. He was the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection and the Minister for Home Affairs from around 2014 to 2021. And as the former deputy secretary of the Department of Immigration, Abul Rizvi, pointed out, Dutton's tenure coincided with an influx of asylum seekers that dwarfs anything that happened under Labour. In fact, no other immigration minister has presided over more asylum applications than Peter Dutton did. There were between 100 and 120,000 applications lodged while Dutton was in charge of the portfolio. And furthermore, there was dysfunction in his department that went further than that. Recently there was a review, the Richardson review, that was damning of his department over the handling of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts for offshore detention. That went so far as awarding contracts to companies that had suspected links to drugs, weapons and other criminal behaviour. You know, tax avoidance, sanctions busting, all these things. And the review found that while Dutton himself wasn't directly responsible, there was a clear, long-standing cultural and procedural failures within the department. And this particularly hits home when we get to a third accusation that Dutton made last week, after these asylum seekers landed in WA. And this time, his claim was true. And that is that the boat was able to slip past Australia's border surveillance because our border surveillance wasn't as good as it might have been.

ANGE:

What are the issues with border surveillance Mike, and how have they been framed by Peter Dutton in this political debate that has kicked off?

MIKE:

Well, he said the fact that this boat arrived, the fact that it managed to slip all the way through to the mainland was that, under Labour, surveillance flights that monitor the seas for possible boat arrivals had declined

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“How can you have a vessel of 40 people arrive, and not be detected? I'll tell you why Ray, because they've cut back the funding for the surveillance flights.”

MIKE:

Actually the numbers bear this out. B\tween 2022 and 2023, the number of flights has fallen around 14%, or 2100 hours of flying. Dutton claimed 20% but the fact is, they are down somewhat.

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“So that's the difficulty that they've got, and you reap what you sow.”

MIKE:

The problem here is, this change had nothing whatsoever to do with the claims about funding cuts. It had to do with bungled contractual arrangements that date all the way back to 2006 under a previous coalition government. And the contract was supposed to end in 2019. But it kept getting extended. The contract eventually grew to be $2.6 billion you know, which is not chump change, right. And a damning audit report in 2021 found that the contract had, quote, not been effective, unquote, and that the contracted company had failed to deliver the, quote, quantum and range of services it should have. The company was flying old planes, which Labour MP, Julian Hill, who's the chair of the Joint Committee on Public Accounts and Audit, he described them as Corollas with a new paint job. That they couldn't fly at night, they were often short on aircrew, they were lacking the latest technology onboard, you know. So despite all of these manifest failings, the Department of Home Affairs extends the contract repeatedly. And it's now scheduled to run to 2027. Now, Dutton was the relevant minister for the six years before this latest decision to extend. The failures of Australia's aerial surveillance were well known while he was in the job, and yet things proceeded as before.

ANGE:

And, I guess it's easy to get caught up in the kind of chess beating and fears of weak borders. But at the end of the day, there's now a few dozen people who are in offshore detention in Nauru. So Mike, when around 40 people arrive on our shores by boat, what conversation should we really be having?

MIKE:

Well, the first point I would make is that boat arrivals are just a very small part of the equation, all this fuss about a few dozen boat arrivals when we still have, according to Abul Rizvi, something like 110,000 asylum seekers still in the country who arrive by plane. You know, so that leads to the second point, I guess, which is, while we don't yet know much about the personal circumstances of a the latest bunch, previous history shows that those who arrive by boat, were largely genuine refugees, you know, people who had a well-founded fear of persecution in their country of origin. Third point, our system of offshore detention is extremely costly, and the billions that we have spent on it have fed corruption in the receiving nations, PNG and Nauru, and also domestically.

But the irony here is that the problems Dutton is banging on about, can be traced back to things that happened, or things that didn't happen and should have happened, under his watch. The new government is spending more. It's revisiting the contracts. It is looking at the assessment processes by which these contracts are entered into. It was actually Dutton who was weak on border security. But he thinks it will help the conservative cause in the Dunkley byelection for him to to bang on about it. And I would suggest the worry there is that if the Libs do well in Dunkley, they will run this same campaign of lies and distortions in the full federal election. And, and I don't think that's a good look.

ANGE:

Mike, thanks so much for your time.

MIKE:

Thank you.

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ANGE:

Also in the news today…

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that an offensive on the crowded city of Rafah in Gaza will happen, even if a potential weeks-long ceasefire delays it.

The Israeli cabinet will convene this week to approve operational plans that include the evacuation of the roughly 1.5 million residents, who have sought refuge in Rafah, to elsewhere in the territory.

And,

Former New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian is attempting to overturn findings that she engaged in serious corrupt conduct, while serving as both premier and as state treasurer.

A two-day hearing in the NSW court of appeals started yesterday, to challenge the findings of the state’s Independent Commission Against Corruption, which found that she was influenced by her secret relationship with fellow MP Daryl Maguire.

I’m Ange MCcormack, this is 7am. We’ll be back again tomorrow.

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