It is not surprising that Mr Shorten wanted the freedom to adopt the Coalition’s policy of pushing back boats and maintaining punitive off shore camps. Nor was it surprising that the Labor Party approved. After all it was a Labor Government that introduced mandatory detention and opened Manus Island.
I have some sympathy with the Party and its Leader. The Coalition policy of stopping the boats is strongly supported by a majority of Australians, and to oppose it would put lead in the Labor saddlebags. It would have been a courageous decision.
Nevertheless the decision does raise questions about the Labor Party. For policies are not merely pieces of paper. Vulnerable and desperate people experience in the flesh the consequences of this policy. The way in which we treat people under our policies, too, have consequences for ourselves. In adopting this policy the Labor Party has endorsed what Australian agents will do to people on the sea and in detention centres in our name.
The reasons given for the change are to make the party electable and to prevent people from dying at sea. Both these reasons rest on the principle that the end justifies the means – that it is right to inflict suffering and harm on innocent people in order to deter others from bringing harm on themselves or from harming the Party.
This infliction of pain for other ends is the maggot in the meat of the policy, simply concealed by the sauce of the harm minimisation measures that Labor has promised. The meat is blown and ethically inedible. And experience says that the sauce added is soon made rancid.
The frank avowal of this ethical principle inevitably raises questions about the Labor Party. The key question is not about what the Party stands for, nor even about whom the Party stands for and against.
It is much more basic. It asks which groups of people the Party will be prepared to harm if they stand in the way of its electoral or other goals. Or put more sharply: whom, if anyone, will the Party not be prepared to sell out should it be in its interests? And if there are any people whose human dignity is not expendable, by what criteria will their value judged to be non-negotiable? We should all be interested in the answers to these questions because we may all potentially be consigned to the camp of the expendable.
The Coalition has made pretty clear its own answer to these questions during its time in government. For it, the wealthy and economically successful are not expendable, and their interests form a clear criterion for untouchability. Others are expendable, even if the targets of the government’s preferred punitive policies are occasionally saved by the demands of electoral success.
With the Labor Party the answer to the question is not so clear. It no longer represents a defined economic or social group, such as manual workers, whose interests might dictate which groups are expendable, as were people of non-European background under the White Australia policy.
When we look at the Party’s record when in office and in opposition, the answer is not reassuring. It introduced the punitive conditions on Manus Island and Nauru. It has not opposed legislation that deprives asylum seekers and those accused of aiding terrorism, mainly Muslims, of access to the rule of law.
In the face of this record it takes great faith to believe that the rhetorical values the Labor Party espouses, such as respect for the human dignity of all people, decency and fairness, will be the operative criteria when it is expedient to sell people out.
This is not to say that there are no decent people with integrity and high values in the Labor party, and indeed also in the Coalition, but only that their integrity and values are unlikely be reflected in action when it is expedient to treat people as means to electoral and other ends.
It follows that the challenge facing the Labor Party is not how to balance doing what is necessary for electoral success with their key values and commitments. Electoral success will win hands down.
Its challenge, shared by an equally single-minded Coalition, is how to make plausible its claim to stand with the Australian people when it is so clearly prepared to sell out anyone who proves expendable. Plausibility will come even harder after last weekend.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.