Can Shorten be trusted to deliver? Source: News Corp Australia

IF LABOR wins office it expects an immediate try-on by people smugglers wanting to test the new government’s resolve.

One reason this unwanted border probing can be expected is the Coalition government has loudly forecast a boom in human trafficking should Labor be elected.

“[People smugglers] will be looking to the weakness of Mr Shorten now, hoping and praying that he is elected at the next election,” said Immigration Minister Peter Dutton Saturday.

The imperative for the Opposition has been to counter that expectation, and to match it with a strand of humanitarian aid to preserve its claimed credentials for compassion.

The broad objective has been to promote a functioning asylum seeker policy, one which has been absent since 2011 when the High Court sank the so-called Malaysian Solution.

And it wants the electorate to know it has finally arrived at a working model.

That’s one reason, possibly the primary one, why Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has put his colleagues and his party conference into a corner: Support his turn back policy or hobble a future Labor government on the issue.

He issued the dare on Wednesday night. On Saturday he had the victory at national conference needed to secure his leadership.

The clear message from the ALP conference in Melbourne this weekend is if there is a boat approaching our shores on day one of a Labor government, it will be turned back.

A Shorten-led Labor wants the electorate to heed that promise. But it is not a simplistic one.

Labor turn backs would be applied to any boat coming from a transit country, usually Indonesia. If the boats come from a primary country — for example, should the asylum seekers sail directly from Sri Lanka or Vietnam — the treatment would change.

The basic premise is that few, if any, people are genuine refugees from Indonesia. They are from Afghanistan, the Midle East or elsewhere and have stopped off in Java on the way to Christmas Island.

Further, those asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Islands will not become citizens, although the handful of refugees on the mainland with the Abbott government’s Temporary Protection Visas — which Labor would abolish — would be given what’s called “a pathway to citizenship”.

In Shorten shorthand: Anyone on these two islands detention centres will never be Australians.

But we will know more about turn backs than the Abbott government — under its two Immigration Ministers Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton — have ever given us.

When a boat of asylum seekers is encountered on the high seas the fact will be reported publicly. There will be no claims of “on water operations” secrecy, no claims that by revealing the activities of our taxpayer-funded agencies we were providing a shipping news service to the people smugglers.

That silly claim to secrecy never made sense and had more to do with the Abbott government’s media policy than any warranted concerns about abetting criminals.

The push for greater transparency on immigration matters is to be applauded. We should know what our government is doing.

A separate rating will be applied on the sincerity of Labor and its leader Bill Shorten. After two years of fighting passionately against turn backs, will he be trusted to deliver on this turn around?