The Twitter bio for the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union reads: ‘We are Australia's oldest and biggest union for manufacturing workers’. It sits directly above an image of Bill Shorten's head superimposed onto a cartoon frog riding a unicycle. The Bill Shorten/frog hybrid exclaims, ‘Here comes dat boi!!!’ Welcome to Australian politics in 2016.

The recent breakdown in the Labor-Greens relationship over the issues of voting reform and an alleged preference deal with the Liberal Party has highlighted the fact that it was electoral necessity, rather than ideology and values, which kept the two parties working together.

It’s important to acknowledge the limits of Andrews’ position. He has written to the Prime Minister offering to host the 267 refugees currently bound for Nauru in Victoria. He hasn’t explicitly opposed mandatory detention or offshore processing, nor has he outlined a specific policy approach that deals with refugees more systemically. It has also been reported that he voted for offshore processing at Labor’s national conference last year.

Can we really support the existence of laws that allow arbitrary immigration decisions to be made in certain situations, but decry their use in another? The law exists to be used at the minister’s discretion. Not only is section 501 the same law used to sanction both Allen and refugees the minister determines have stepped out of line, the entire immigration framework and the way it treats access to Australia as a reward and punishment mechanism cannot simply be shoved to the side and ignored.

References to human rights, originally included in the draft agreement, have all been deleted from the operational parts of the final deal. There are no mechanisms that force countries to comply with even their initial weak plans, and a new mechanism of five yearly reviews seems redundant given the urgency of the issue. If it’s all bad news, why are environmentalists and the Greens hailing it as a step forward?