When asked by Tom Tilly how the plan will work under Trump, Dutton remained elusive:
“We can only deal with one President at a time,” he said. “This is the result of months of work, we’ll continue to work with the Obama administration and continue to run with the Trump administration.”
When pressed further on a situation where this deal won’t be successful, Dutton did mentioned the usual unnamed, elusive “third countries” he’s still in talks with. The ones that have, until now, included Cambodia, the countries these people risked their lives escaping, or nada.
He also mentioned in a later Sky News piece that he kind of just hopes Trump will honour the agreement. Because it is important to Australia, you see.
To be fair, Dutton’s kind of non-answer is an entirely reasonable response; nobody counted on Trump winning, and it’d be hard to imagine the Liberal Party creating a plan on the basis that it’ll eventually be defeated.
It honestly sounds like Dutton just hopes the refugees are settled well before Barack Obama leaves January 20th and the end times begin. Then, this deal and our turnback policy (aka refoulement) will at long last make people seeking asylum by boat some other country’s problem.
The interview contained a few more highlight, notably a reference to the untouched New Zealand offer to take refugees. Dutton weirdly maintained that New Zealand was a backdoor to reaching Australia, an argument that relies on the people seeking asylum wanting it solely from our country and not, y’know, anywhere that won’t torture them.
He also, weirdly, maintained that Australia taking American refugees, likely originating from Costa Rica, does not constitute a people swap, even though swapping people is literally what is going to happen.