Julia Gillard dived straight into a political minefield, write Phillip Coorey and Damien Murphy.
As Mark Arbib and Bill Shorten were urging Julia Gillard to knife Kevin Rudd, the then prime minister was in his Parliament House office, meeting the East Timorese President, Jose Ramos-Horta.
It was June 23 and elsewhere in the building, a busy Defence Minister, John Faulkner, was preparing for an announcement on force arrangements for Afghanistan following the withdrawal of the Dutch.
Previously, nothing like this happened inside the ALP without Faulkner knowing about it. His unofficial role was to watch the Prime Minister’s back but this time the business of running a war distracted him.
Faulkner’s decision to quit the frontbench after the election is believed by some colleagues to be motivated in part by a desire to push back against the influence of Arbib and the NSW Right, which is being likened in some quarters to a return of Graham Richardson.
Rudd had dined with Ramos-Horta at the Lodge the night before. During their two-hour-plus official talks the next day, they discussed climate change, education, agriculture, rural water sanitation, controlling animal infectious diseases, hospitals, access to microfinance and the controversial Greater Sunrise gas project. One of the topics that went unmentioned was asylum seekers and any suggestion that East Timor would become the site of a regional clearing house for refugees.
Now, in her first two weeks as Prime Minister, Gillard has undermined her own credibility by first naming East Timor in the context of fixing the boat people issue and then hurriedly backing away from East Timor with something that can only be described as a Non-Specific Solution.
Of course, the pundits went ballistic, so too did talkback.
It remains a moot point if her East Timor falter went down well in the marginal electorates where asylum seekers is a push-button issue and whose voters Gillard singled out for a personal message when delivering her statement on foreign affairs at the Lowy Institute in Sydney on Tuesday.
”It is wrong to label people who have concerns about unauthorised arrivals as ‘rednecks’. Of course, there are racists in every country, but expressing a desire for a clear and firm policy to deal with a very difficult problem does not make you a racist,” she said.
Rudd would never have been rash enough to approach East Timor in such haste. Senior diplomatic sources have told the Herald Rudd was advised against broaching the subject with Ramos-Horta because it was a bad idea. Rudd himself was aware of this, the source said.
For about six months, the Immigration Minister, Chris Evans had been sounding out the lukewarm United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees about a regional reprocessing centre in a third country.
