How stupid does Julia Gillard think "redneck central'' is? She can't honestly believe voters in marginal electorates will fall for her election-eve volte-face on asylum seekers, announced in a speech this week to the Lowy Institute.
She can't honestly believe they will be grateful for her patronising defence of them as not being the racist, bigoted "rednecks" refugee advocates such as Julian Burnside say they are. Especially while she bent over backwards to praise him as: ''Prominent Australian, Julian Burnside, QC, an eminent lawyer, much respected in our community.''
Everyone knows that it was the Labor policies crafted by Julia Gillard, when she was shadow immigration minister, that turned a trickle of about three unauthorised boat arrivals a year into an escalating three boats a week, leading to more than 150 drowning deaths of asylum seekers along the way, and almost 600 children currently in detention. But after years of vilifying conservatives for supporting the Howard government policies that stopped the flow of boats, Labor thinks it can turn around within weeks of an election, without admitting they were wrong, and create their own version of a ''Pacific solution''. Read more.