Two days ago, I suspected that Turnbull was going to have his refugee resolve tested. Firstly, there was Jaffari who set himself on fire. Then there was the open letter to Turnbull penned by asylum seekers at Manus Island.

Now, there’s a lot more to come as Greg Sheridan of The Australian outlines:

‘A new wave of boats filled with asylum-seekers will test the resolve­ of Malcolm Turnbull’s government team. Australia’s intelligence agencies understand the highly developed people-smuggling industry is readying to test the new Prime Minister and his new national securit­y team, epitomised by a completely inexperienced new Defence Minister in Marise Payne…

The people-smugglers have been following­ Australia’s political changes closely. They know the new PM has a reputation for coming­ from the soft-hearted end of his party and they will quickly be informed that the same is true for the new Defence Minister…

Kevin Andrews … should not have gone and Payne has so far shown nothing in her career to suggest she can do the defence job well…

[H]er appointment must be read as a significant downgrade to the importance of defence… In five minutes’ time she will have to present a defence white paper, full of the most intricate strategic, financial and force structure decisions, about which she presently knows next to nothing, and in the formulation of which she has had no role’.

It’s almost as if they were reading my last post.

(With thanks to Andrew Bolt for providing the above excerpt here).