This was published 7 years ago
Fancy a flutter on your doomed-to-fail US refugee deal, Peter Dutton?
Does Peter Dutton genuinely believe the US is going to take the refugees languishing on Nauru and Manus Island? Let's find out!
By Andrew P Street
No matter what one's political affiliations are, there was a great deal of well-founded scepticism at the announcement earlier this month that Australia had reached a one-off resettlement deal with the United States for the refugees currently languishing in offshore detention.
"I can now confirm that the government has reached a further third country resettlement arrangement for refugees presently in the regional processing centres," Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced at the time, whacking in that "further" to inaccurately imply that there was any other resettlement deal on the table. "The agreement is with the United States. It is a one-off agreement. It will not be repeated."
Peter Dutton.Credit: Andrew Meares
And US officials have arrived to begin assessing the people we're refusing to accept, although they've also made clear that any resettlement won't happen before the new administration comes in on January 20.
But ol' P-Dutty is remaining characteristically angry about any suggestion that his obviously doomed plan is in any way obviously doomed.
Why, when Sky News reported that only 300 or 400 refugees of the 2400 on Nauru and Manus Island would be resettled, Dutton immediately declared that was "completely false", and then refused to explain what the supposedly completely true version was.
"I'm not going to detail that, and there are very good reasons for that," he told them while remaining adorably coy about what those good reasons might be: "It's not in our best interests to have that number out there. [But] the reports about the 300 number are completely false. I don't want people to conjure up in their mind that this is limited by that number - it's not."
And he's probably right in saying that the resettlement isn't limited by that number, because it's far more likely that the resettlement will be more seriously limited by there not being any resettlement whatsoever.
The most obvious reason that any refugee deal would seem doomed to immediate failure is its unfortunate timing.
The American president elect based his election campaign on a combination of rejecting international deals, deporting immigrants and railing against Muslims, so it would seem somewhat off message for him to begin his term by merrily ratifying a deal to take Muslim immigrants from a foreign country.
More specifically, Donald Trump also made clear that his proposed ban on Muslims would focus on nations "compromised by terrorism" – like, for example, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Guess which countries a load of the Muslim refugees on Manus and Nauru were fleeing?
And it's a bit difficult for us to tell the US that our detainees were merely desperate people running for their lives and deserving of a second chance when we've spent all this time and literally billions of dollars furiously arguing the opposite case – even though, as we all know, this was always and only about saving lives at sea. Right?
But let's take Dutton at his word. And let's make it interesting.
How about this: if the US deal falls over, Australia takes all the people currently on Manus Island and Nauru and stops being such a jerk about our human rights obligations?
And it's nice that Pete's feeling confident and everything, but recent history suggests that he's not terribly good at this "resettlement" thing.
Sure, Dutton did insist that Australia absolutely wouldn't have to close Manus Island detention centre because the decision of the Papua New Guinea supreme court that it was unconstitutional didn't apply to us - because "the decision of the Supreme Court is one that binds the PNG Government not the Australian Government". And that turned out to be obviously, laughably wrong.
He also got to sign off on the farcical failed deal that his equally-adept predecessor Scott Morrison cut with Cambodia, which saw Australia pay $55 million dollars to resettle a total of two people – which Duffer straight-facedly called "a pretty good outcome" on national television. Which is true, provided that one agrees with Dutton's excitingly unconventional definitions of "good", "outcome" and "pretty".
So his strike rate so far has been two swings, two misses. One more really ought to force him out.
Up for a wager, Pete? Or just planning to run out the year and hope no one remembers when this all falls over?
Meanwhile, our circus of avoidable human suffering continues at great public expense.
Andrew P Street's new book The Curious Story of Malcolm Turnbull: the Incredible Shrinking Man in the Top Hat is out now through Allen & Unwin.