Extract from ABC News
The 2001 federal election is remembered as the Tampa election: the campaign when a group of asylum seekers in a stranded Indonesian fishing vessel were rescued in the Indian Ocean by the captain of the MV Tampa, a Norwegian container ship.
Amid the escalation of fear about national security after September 11, the incident sparked the ugly escalation of border protection rhetoric and spawned famous John Howard campaign launch declaration that "we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come".
People arriving in boats, the dark suggestions went, could possibly be terrorists, amongst other things. Four young boys among the 433 asylum seekers on the Tampa were subsequently taken in by New Zealand.
Abbas Nazari was one of them. Seven years old at the time, the now very cheery young man has been studying in the US recently after winning a Fulbright Scholarship and will release a book on his life in August to mark 20 years since the Tampa incident.
Obviously, just the sort of riff raff we generous Australians wanted to keep out!
But the Tampa episode was also part of another significant story of the 2001 election campaign: the collapse of the One Nation vote.
One Nation's fall is relevant today
Pauline Hanson's One Nation party had roared into national prominence in 1998 as a result of stunning wins in the Queensland state election and then by capturing almost 9 per cent of the national vote in the federal election.
Party disarray, attacks on Hanson led by Tony Abbott, but mostly a shift to the right by Howard, saw the party's vote fall to just 4.3 per cent in 2001.
Having lost voters to the minor party on guns in 1998, Howard won them back with the Tampa and Children Overboard claims; by not saying sorry to Indigenous Australians; and by not moving on climate change.
Why is this all relevant in a year when the election result is seen so heavily through the prism of a global pandemic and electoral endorsement, or otherwise, of various governments' handling of the crisis?
We are now getting to the pointy end of the electoral cycle. The prospects of the economy fading next year, of further outbreaks of COVID undermining the government's credentials, all have political pundits firming in their view that we will go to an election this year rather than next.
Shades of Tampa this week
Just completed YouGov polling obtained by the ABC shows a softening in voters' views that the economy is heading in the right direction, that optimism about the economic future may have peaked, and that more households expect things to get worse for them in the next 12 months.
And a quarter of Australians still say they are worse off than a year ago, despite all the talk about the economic bounce back and buoyant job market.
The same polling also shows that while the number of voters who think the behaviour and actions of the PM in the pandemic has been helpful has dropped from 68 per cent in April last year to 55 per cent in March and just 50 per cent this month, the number of people who actually think his actions have been harmful now stands at 30 per cent.
Both ratings are considerably worse than the (stable) standing of state premiers, and the PM outranks regular COVID villains like the airlines and banks in harmfulness.
So beyond the handling of the pandemic, some political observers see Scott Morrison taking a similar approach in 2021 to Howard, with the ramping up of aggressive foreign policy rhetoric, and his digging in on not moving further to achieve net-zero emissions even as he attends this weekend's G7 meeting.
A little girl being medically
evacuated from detention on Christmas Island this week has punctured
the clear political messages about the dangers of asylum seekers used by
John Howard in 2001 however.
Will it be an election issue?
For once, asylum seekers have faces and names — the Murugappan family. They are even commonly given the name of a Queensland town — Biloela — which has taken them into its heart.
There has been growing community disquiet about the bloody mindedness of the government's cack-handed handling of this affair.
Brisbane radio host Neil Breen wanted a clear answer from Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews about the fate of the family, noting half a million people have signed a petition to keep them in Australia.
Andrews'
splendid response was that "I did try and be very clear two days ago
when I said, broadly for the cohorts, that we were looking at resettling
moments".
It's not clear whether or not the plight of the Biloela family registers high amongst the many voters in Queensland who voted for One Nation in 2019.
But what happens to those voters — and their preferences — is now central to the campaign planning of both sides of politics.
Where One Nation votes go
Keep in mind that across a swathe of seats in Queensland last election, One Nation picked up around 17 per cent of the vote.
Its preferences were therefore crucial in determining the outcome.
It should also not be presumed that all these votes came from the Coalition. Many of them were protest votes that switched from Labor.
It is usually said that changes of government only occur in Australian politics when there is a big swing on, a mood for change.
But the question is whether this is still true in an era when minority government, or wafer-thin majorities, have become a more regular feature of elections.
At the last election, for example, the net change in the Coalition's majority was one seat — from 76 seats in the 151 seat House of Representatives to 77.
While it is equally said that campaigns are fought in every seat — and candidate disasters and the like can bring seats unexpectedly into play — it looks a little like this looming election could be one where one of the smallest group of seats in recent memory is actually in contention.
Labor holds hopes of winning a seat in Tasmania and potentially a couple of seats in Queensland, with most focus on the seat of Flynn where the LNP MP Ken O'Dowd is retiring.
Gladstone Mayor Matt Burnett has been chosen as Labor's candidate and the LNP is nervous. They acknowledge he's a very good local candidate.
Gladstone, according to campaign workers on the ground at the time, went pear-shaped for Labor in 2019 after a disastrous Bill Shorten press conference where he avoided answering questions about the economic cost of Labor's emissions-reduction target.
That points to how tricky it will be for Anthony Albanese on energy in Queensland: he may have a great candidate on the ground, but the risks lie in having a double-edged message on energy that is supposed to placate both Queensland coal seats and the rest of the country.
Labor has deliberately not released much policy amid the noise of the COVID crisis.
It looks set to campaign on just a few key policies which will be launched during the campaign. The dynamics in 2021 will be very different to 2019.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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