Kevin Rudd unmasked in Devil's Island plan
July 22, 2013
Paul Sheehan
Sydney Morning Herald columnist
The mask has dropped. We now see the real character of the man who leads Australia, a man so overbearing, so dysfunctional, so self-obsessed that his own government sacked him in his first term, unprecedented in Australian politics, and a third of the cabinet departed rather than serve with him when he returned.
There is no new Rudd. There is only the Dear Leader who, on Monday, expects the federal Labor caucus to approve measures he has proposed that would make it almost impossible to remove him from the leadership if he wins the election.
On Friday, Rudd revealed that he will do anything, say anything, trash any principle, if he thinks it will keep him in power.
His Devil's Island tactic, putting asylum seekers in tents on a malarial island off the coast of an impoverished, violence-ridden state, is malevolent politics. He has made a massive bet that he can get away with this ploy before it can be tested by the courts, where it would almost certainly be rejected.
This does not concern Rudd. Legal challenges take months. He is thinking in weeks. He just wants to get across the line, win the election, and clean up the mess afterwards. The mess he made.
The policy of turning back the boats is humane compared with this policy. Not surprisingly, there was a riot at the detention centre on Nauru on Friday night, leaving the centre destroyed by its inmates and a bill estimated at $60 million - to be footed by you.
Even the opposition, which has always supported offshore processing of asylum seekers, appears gobsmacked by Rudd's audacity. As Scott Morrison - the immigration spokesman and a man not noted for softness on border protection - pointed out, it will take years to build a functioning processing centre on Manus Island, as distinct from the row of tents that Rudd is now treating as a policy centrepiece.
Rudd's Devil's Island ploy is beyond cynical. It is grotesque. The policy has not a shred of functional credibility, policy consistency or moral coherence.
In an essay in The Monthly in October 2006, Rudd wrote: ''Another great challenge of our age is asylum seekers. The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst. That is why the government's proposal to excise the Australian mainland from the entire Australian migration zone and to rely almost exclusively on the so-called Pacific solution should be the cause of great ethical concern to all the Christian churches.''
I don't think anyone has accussed kevin of not being a hypocrite.
After winning government in 2007 and dismantling the Howard government's effective border protection measures, the then minister for immigration, Chris Evans, enunciated the reasons for doing so:
''Labor committed to abolishing the Pacific solution and this was one of the first things the Rudd Labor government did on taking office. It was also one of my greatest pleasures in politics. 
''Neither humane nor fair, the Pacific solution was also ineffective and wasteful. At massive cost to the Australian taxpayer - I am advised that the Department of Immigration and Citizenship expended $309.8 million between September 2001 and February 29, 2008 to run the Nauru and Manus offshore processing centres - the Howard government sought to outsource our international protection obligations to less-developed countries when we should have been shouldering them ourselves … the Pacific solution was not about maintaining integrity or public confidence in Australia's arrangements. It was about the cynical politics of punishing refugees for domestic political purposes.''
In 2009, the government's hubris was encapsulated by federal Labor MP Michael Danby, who - after a tour of the 800-bed, $400 million detention centre on Christmas Island built by the Howard government - likened the facility to a ''stalag'', a ''German prisoner-of-war camp'' and an ''enormous white elephant''.
Within a year the centre was overflowing, which made Danby a stalag operator. Now he and the rest of the government are committed to operating a punitive tent camp in Papua New Guinea. As the number of boat arrivals began to swell, Rudd maintained the pretence that his policies were having little material effect.
To support this fiction, boat people were transferred to Christmas Island but housed in a construction camp, and private accommodation and an obsolete facility at Phosphate Hill - anywhere but the new detention centre. Reality prevailed, the centre was opened and quickly filled, 200 extra bunk beds were shipped in, a 500-bed detention centre opened in Darwin, and demountable homes, meant for Aborigines, were flown from Alice Springs to Christmas Island to increase the centre's capacity.
On and on it has since gone, creating a multibillion-dollar black hole that can only get bigger. ''It will not be inexpensive,'' Rudd said with a straight face as he announced his PNG ploy. ''Our responsibility … is to ensure that we have a robust system of border security and orderly migration … as well as fulfilling our legal and compassionate obligations under the refugees convention.''
Legal and compassionate obligations. What a dark joke. Two weeks ago I met long-serving foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer, who has friends on both sides of politics. This is what he had to say about Rudd:
''In all my years in politics I never encountered anyone more cynical, opportunistic and narcissistic than Kevin Rudd. ''He will do anything to gain an advantage.''
