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Photo: Getty
Photo: Getty

PoliticsJuly 3, 2016

Australia’s marathon election reaches the finish line, but refuses to finish

Photo: Getty
Photo: Getty

Australia wakes to discover it can’t make its mind up. Elle Hunt recaps the action from Sydney

It’s the campaign that never ends, it just goes on and on, my friends…

After an eight-week campaign and a neck-and-neck contest in which not very much happened, the Australian election was expected to be a close-run thing, with polls taken the night before showing Malcolm Turnbull’s Coalition ahead by 50.5% to Labor’s 49.5%.

Australia, this morning. Photo: iStock
Australia, this morning. Photo: iStock

But no one expected it to be this close – not really.

As election night ticked over to the morning, it still wasn’t clear who would be prime minister.

A string of Coalition MPs were defeated after a nationwide swing against the government, while Labor made gains – but, either way, it was too close to call.

Turnbull’s party seemed rattled by the tight contest, with senior figures, including the PM himself, blaming Labor’s scare campaign over their plans for the public healthcare scheme (a “monstrous lie”, said the foreign minister, Julie Bishop) for turning the tide against them.

But questions over whether the Coalition might have fared better under Tony Abbott – Turnbull’s onion-eating predecessor, from whom he wrested leadership last year – seemed enough to turn the right-wing on itself.

A conservative radio host told one of Turnbull’s key supporters that he had been “chief bedwetter” in the leadership spill. Abbott’s former chief of staff bickered with the current attorney-general while live on air on a panel on Sky News. Former PM John Howard “grieved” the night’s result.

And in what was described as an “epic cry-wank of fury”, Andrew Bolt, a right-wing commentator, accused Turnbull of turning “everything to ruin” and calling for him to resign.

It’s true that Turnbull won’t be in a comfortable position even if the Coalition does end up forming a majority government.

He was nowhere to be seen on election night until after midnight, when he eventually turned up to his party’s event. “I’m sure that as the results are refined and come in over the next few days with all of the counting, we will be able to form that majority government,” he said. “But, let me say this, let me say this without any fear of contradiction. The Labor party has no capacity in this parliament to form a stable majority government. That is a fact.”

With counting of the postal votes upon which Turnbull’s fate depends resuming on Tuesday, however, the fact is it will be a few days yet before we get a definitive result.

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OPINIONOpinionJuly 3, 2016

Justifying a meagre refugee quota because of the homeless problem is a terrible, terrible argument

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Charity may start at home, but it shouldn’t stop there, writes Amnesty International’s Grant Bayldon

I spent a recent chilly Thursday night sleeping in the car with my son at Mangere Town Centre. It was the Park Up For Homes event, raising awareness of local homelessness.

I can’t pretend it was a great hardship for one night we had that satisfying feeling of knowing there was a hot shower waiting for us at home. Not only that; we were surrounded by enthusiastic volunteers offering us snacks and hot chocolate. Musicians played, sausage sizzle smells wafted around, people nodded along to speeches, and in the morning there was early horn-honking and waving all around as people packed up to leave.

It wasn’t meant to replicate the experience of living in a car, just to raise awareness of it. But beneath it was a strong shared belief about what’s a basic human need the right to adequate housing which is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a deep concern for how this is being eroded.

An Amnesty International demonstration at parliament Photo: Amnesty International
An Amnesty International demonstration at parliament. Photo: Amnesty International

One sleep in a real bed later I was just down the road from the town centre at the opening of the rebuilt Mangere Refugee Resettlement Centre. After 70 years the dilapidated, paint-peeling, drafty army barracks have finally been retired. After the powhiri and speeches, the Burundi drummers kicked off an extravaganza of cultural performances from refugee background communities.

The government had just made its refugee quota review announcement. After being stagnant for 30 years it will increase from 2018 by just 250.

Trawl back through the prime minister’s media interviews on refugees and you’ll hear a lot of subtle messaging about local housing shortages. On the face of it, that’s fair enough. After all, refugees need housing, and we already have homelessness.

But dig a little deeper and the foundations of this messaging start to look decidedly rotten.

The first reason is obvious. The 250 extra refugees represent just 80 families a tiny number even by New Zealand standards who will be spread around the country. In fact only those with families already in Auckland will go there. The rest are largely settled in provincial centres which do not have housing shortages.

But there’s a second problem with the government’s messaging that’s really ironic. Because by subtly playing off homelessness against refugee resettlement, the government is missing the point that refugees are by definition people who have had to flee their homes and their home countries. As Anglican Bishop Justin Duckworth recently said, homelessness is homelessness whether it’s caused by war or poverty  we can and should work on both.

The obvious win for the government in putting the issue of the refugee quota up against homelessness could be to play off supporters of increasing the refugee quota against supporters of action on homelessness, without actually doing anything significant on either.

So what does it mean to be a country that not only addresses its own human rights issues locally, like homelessness, but also plays its part in the broader international issue? Should we really do anything at all internationally until we’ve fixed everything here? After all, tune into talkback or make the mistake of reading online newspaper comments and you’ll be constantly reminded that charity begins at home.

It turns out that the old “charity begins at home” chestnut is quite helpful here. Because far from being a warning against being too generous to outsiders, it was originally intended to mean something more like “charity only begins at home, it doesn’t end there”.

It’s easy and comfortable to think of national self-interest as the right approach probably because it’s just a modern take on our ancestors’ tribal thinking. And, as singer Ruth Mundy puts it, it’s easy to think that we are to thank for our own good luck, as if it were something that we earned.

If you haven’t come across the “Good Country Index” you should have a look. It ranks countries on how they contribute to the world, relative to size. The premise is that the big challenges that face us as a world are global ones. That every single problem would be better dealt with as an international one learning from others, bringing them in, coming to an international understanding. That we’ll never get anywhere unless we kick the habit of thinking just of domestic self-interest. And we need to move on to understand that charity only begins at home.

The great thing about taking an enlightened international view is that it pays off domestically too. As Good Country Index founder Simon Anholt points out, the countries we admire are the good ones, the ones that work to make the world safer, better and fairer. And with a good reputation everything is easy you get more tourists, more business meetings, you can even sell your products more easily.

That’s the sort of country I want to live in. One that considers homelessness from both a local and global perspective. One that, rather than playing them off against each other, works meaningfully on both.

Grant Bayldon is the Executive Director of Amnesty International NZ

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