Phoebe Wearne: Scott Morrison’s Government in fair dinkum fight for survival

If recent Australian politics has taught us anything about Aussie slang, it’s that the definition of “fair dinkum” depends on your outlook.

Scott Morrison and, to a lesser extent, Bill Shorten have been giving the phrase a good workout as they compete to be the most true blue Aussie, a special blend of Paul Hogan and Chips Rafferty.

On election day in 2013, which feels like a very long time ago, this reporter spent several hours following Labor veteran Gary Gray around as he fought to hold on to his usually safe seat of Brand.

Conversations with voters at polling booths in the suburbs north-east of Rockingham, many of them parents or tradesmen who worked on the Kwinana strip, suggested immigration was at the forefront of many minds.

Generally they weren’t heartless or xenophobic people — they’d just had enough of the thousands of deaths at sea that marred the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd era, or had been drawn in by Tony Abbott’s pithy three-word mantra to “stop the boats”.

Labor swung in behind mandatory offshore detention in the later days of the Gillard government and most Australians seemed to accept that the dire situation playing out off Australia’s coast required drastic action.

Fast forward five years and it’s pretty clear that keeping children on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru for up to five years doesn’t amount to fair dinkum border policy.

A YouGov Galaxy poll in the News Corp tabloids on Sunday found concern over treatment of refugees, with almost 80 per cent of the 1000 respondents urging the Government to resettle children on Nauru in New Zealand.

Support for the NZ deal was strongest among millennials, thousands of whom will soon vote in their first Federal election after they rushed last year to join the electoral roll to have their say on same-sex marriage.

So while the coalition is marked up for having a hardline approach on border protection, it appears voters may also now be marking it down for allowing indefinite limbo for hundreds of people (particularly children), the majority of whom have been found by Home Affairs officials to be “fair dinkum” refugees.

After Sydney GP Kerryn Phelps gave the medical community’s concerns about the kids’ welfare a national platform in the battle for Wentworth, the issue became a nasty political pinch point.

There are now only 40 children of asylum seekers living on Nauru, which Liberal MPs point to as evidence that the Government has been slowly moving them off.

But doctors and activists suggest this has been done too slowly, with the pace of removal picking up only in recent weeks as emboldened crossbench MPs escalated the pressure on the Government as it slipped into minority.

In a major development yesterday, former attorney-general George Brandis told London radio that all children are likely to leave Nauru by the end of the year.

Morrison and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton did not dispute the timeline, but said the Government was working quietly without “showboating”.

“The numbers have been dropping over a period of time, and our desire is to remove people from Manus and Nauru,” Dutton said. “But we’ve been very clear about the fact that they won’t settle permanently in Australia, and we want the people smugglers to get that message loud and clear.”

The issue is just one of the melange that Malcolm Turnbull gifted to Morrison when he quit Parliament upon being clumsily removed from the nation’s top job, forcing a by-election in a seat where Liberal voters tend to fall at the socially progressive end of the spectrum.

That left Morrison fighting Wentworth, and since then within his own party, on discrimination in religious schools and climate change when instead he wanted to be more focused on debates around electricity prices and Labor’s tax agenda.

In the wake of the resounding Yes result in last year’s national same-sex marriage survey, one could only conclude that the nation had shifted towards supporting gay rights.

Is allowing faith-based schools that are partially funded by the taxpayer to expel gay students fair dinkum?

Wentworth said no, and after 133 of 150 Federal electorates voted in favour of legalising gay marriage, it’s fair to assume much of the rest of the country is on the same page.

But Morrison is yet to act on his campaign promise to remove the exemption that allows discrimination against students on the basis of sexuality because his Government is trying to insert a new religious protection for schools into the legislation which the ALP doesn’t like.

The question of whether religious schools should be able to discriminate against gay teachers is more controversial, and is not going away until the Turnbull-commissioned review of whether religious freedoms are adequately protected has been released, debated and (likely) buried.

There is one issue that has dominated over recent weeks, however, that Morrison supporters can’t blame on Turnbull.

The idea of shifting Australia’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is an all-Morrison mistake. Even yesterday, when Morrison suggested Turnbull had been speaking out of turn when the issue was raised between the former PM and Indonesian leader Joko Widodo, the same problems with the entire concept were laid bare.

Morrison may fancy portraying himself as a bonzer, fair dinkum bloke, but you can’t just put on a broad accent that would feel at home in an episode of 1970s TV show Bellbird.

These issues are complex, particularly when you are a member of the balkanised coalition party room.

Most punters would suggest the meaning of being fair dinkum is to tell the truth. And the only truth is the Government is only shifting its position on asylum seekers now because it has sniffed the breeze.