Australia has recently had an election that was won (quite unexpectedly due to bad polling) by the incumbent political party (actually a semi-permanent coalition but that’s irrelevant in this case).
Before the election, which the opposition was widely expected to win, there talk of “land mines” being set for the expected new government, intended to destabilise them early on.
In the past week:
* asylum seeker boats from Sri Lanka were intercepted. Boat arrivals are a big issue in Australian politics, and the timing would have placed a new government in a bind
* a flotilla of Chinese warships sailed into Sydney Harbour on a friendly visit catching the public and media by surprise. The visit was approved post-election by the Prime Minister, but was said to be in the works for a while. Again, this would have been a very difficult issue for a new government to deal with.
* These raids on journalists. The first raid, before the ABC was raided was actually on a journalist for News Corp Australia, which had been hostile to the opposition during the election. The optics would have looked terrible if they had won the election, and then their foes raided...it would have been portrayed as payback.
If these raids are really “just” post-electoral land mines firing, they’ll stop soon enough, and won’t represent a fundamental shift in Australia’s freedom of the press. If not, then there is real trouble ahead
Before the election, which the opposition was widely expected to win, there talk of “land mines” being set for the expected new government, intended to destabilise them early on.
In the past week:
* asylum seeker boats from Sri Lanka were intercepted. Boat arrivals are a big issue in Australian politics, and the timing would have placed a new government in a bind
* a flotilla of Chinese warships sailed into Sydney Harbour on a friendly visit catching the public and media by surprise. The visit was approved post-election by the Prime Minister, but was said to be in the works for a while. Again, this would have been a very difficult issue for a new government to deal with.
* These raids on journalists. The first raid, before the ABC was raided was actually on a journalist for News Corp Australia, which had been hostile to the opposition during the election. The optics would have looked terrible if they had won the election, and then their foes raided...it would have been portrayed as payback.
If these raids are really “just” post-electoral land mines firing, they’ll stop soon enough, and won’t represent a fundamental shift in Australia’s freedom of the press. If not, then there is real trouble ahead