By Shaun Carney
If you heard a muffled thud last Saturday morning, it might have been the sound of your local Labor MP's head exploding. The West Australian newspaper that morning ran an exclusive story flagging the Gillard government's imminent announcement of a community detention policy for asylum seekers. It was a good get, to use the journalistic phrase, and the ABC's morning current affairs show AM led with a follow-up.
The segment involved an interview with Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who, the presenter said, ''has been working with the Gillard government to bring about this major policy change''. Hanson-Young obviously had knowledge of the policy shift and she left the impression that she was in some way responsible for it. Asked how close the policy was to being a ''done deal'', she said: ''Look, I think we're very close, I think we're very close and I think the minister has moved quite swiftly to remedy this problem. I spoke with the minister about this in his first week and stressed that we can't keep going down this awful, awful path.'' In fact, during the brief interview, Hanson-Young used the word ''we'' 10 times.
Illustration: Spooner
But here's the thing: Hanson-Young had not been negotiating this policy shift with the government and the government had not briefed her about it. The meeting to which she referred in the AM appearance was the only time she had spoken with Immigration Minister Chris Bowen. Bowen made this clear on Monday when he announced the new policy with Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
He put it this way: ''In relation to the Greens, since becoming Minister for Immigration I have had one meeting with Sarah Hanson-Young very early in the term . . .
''Of course, the Greens position on detention is well known, that's a matter of public record, and that view has been expressed to me in that very early meeting. There have been no further discussions between Senator Hanson-Young and I, or the government and the Greens, about the details of this matter. They have their own policy in relation to legislation that is quite different to our policy.''
So how did Hanson-Young know about it? Gillard and Bowen had no doubt that the new policy had leaked from the church and charity groups on which the policy is based, and with which the government had been negotiating since before the August 21 election.
It should come as no surprise that the Greens have good links with those sectors. For example, the head of Uniting Care, Lin Hatfield Dodds, prominent in news reports of the new policy this week, was a Greens Senate candidate in the ACT this year.
Bowen said he believed the risk of the policy leaking before a government announcement was ''a price worth paying to make sure we get this announcement right, that we consult with the churches and charities we will be asking to undertake this work''. In practical terms, he is right; a community detention policy that relies on churches and charities to look after asylum seekers cannot be produced from under a hat.
However, the experience of last weekend, in which Hanson-Young succeeded in portraying herself and her party as the engines of the new policy, left a lot of Bowen's colleagues in the Labor caucus shaking their heads in despair. Gillard and Bowen took pains on Monday to emphasise that this was Labor's work alone, but by then it was too late.
One rule in today's political media landscape is that the first one out gets bragging rights, and Hanson-Young's brazen performance - which conformed almost perfectly with the Coalition's portrayal of the government as a formal partnership between Labor and the Greens, with the latter running policy direction - made her the winner.
In any case, just how much Labor's lost voters are open to reconsidering switching back to the ALP right now is very much up in the air. No matter what the government does on issues such as asylum seekers, it is likely that for the foreseeable future a substantial proportion of those voters who defected from Labor to the Greens will continue to see the ALP glass as being half empty, rather than half full.
Of course, Hanson-Young had a right to use any information she could get via her party's community networks to make herself look good. All is fair in love and war, after all. The problem for the Labor Party is that it cannot work out which of those conditions describes the Greens-ALP relationship.
There is unhappiness and unease within the caucus over this. Some MPs continue to express disappointment over Gillard's ostentatious, and very public agreement, with the Greens - in particular its sole lower house MP, Adam Bandt - signed after the election as she tried to gather together a majority on the floor of the House. Their argument is that Bandt had already signalled that he had no choice but to back Labor, so why give the appearance of setting up a formal alliance with the party that is trying to replace Labor, thus enhancing its stature?
The conflicted nature of this relationship is concentrating the minds of Victorian Labor in the lead-up to the November 27 state election. If the Greens performance in some of its target inner-city seats is a guide, there are few places it won't go in order to secure victory. In the seat of Richmond last week, it sent a pamphlet to homes in Fitzroy North claiming that VicRoads planned to swallow up parkland and build a six-lane arterial road within three metres of a retirement village. VicRoads and the Brumby government have ruled it out. The Greens are unrepentant.
In the neighbouring seat of Brunswick, a forged letter, supposedly from the outgoing Labor MP Carlo Carli, also played up the theme of Labor as being the party of freeways. The Greens deny issuing the letter. Not all of the new politics, as represented by the march of the Greens, is all that new.
Shaun Carney is Age associate editor.