Bill Shorten struggling to unite his party on asylum seeker policy

BILL Shorten has a big job if he wants to win the election, starting with getting his party behind this contentious issue.

Bill Shorten at the Gosnells Healthcare centre in Perth during the campaign. Picture: Kym Smith

OPPOSITION leader Bill Shorten is struggling to unify his party on its asylum seeker policy, with yet another Labor candidate criticising the ALP’s stance.

Western Australian Labor candidate Bill Leadbetter yesterday struggled to explain his position on the asylum seeker issue after being caught out by a Facebook post he made earlier this year.

Mr Leadbetter, who is running in the marginal seat of Hasluck made a comment on his social media profile that Australia needed to be both “prudent and merciful” as he attended a Let Them Stay rally.

Asked whether he thought offshore processing was merciful, he said: “No, but I do think it’s prudent.”

Mr Leadbetter said he “absolutely agreed” with Labor’s policy on the issue and still supported it.

Asked to confirm that he believed the policy was not merciful but was prudent, he said: “Yes, I do. But I think that we can do both.”

Mr Leadbetter struggled to explain his stance.

“It’s a complex and detailed matter and to do it in front of the media like this is neither easy… it’s nuanced,” he said.

He said his personal position remained that Australia needed to be “compassionate, we need to be prudent, we need to protect our borders and we need to make sure that the people who are in our detention camps are treated well.”

He was them ushered away by minders who said he had “another event”.

Mr Shorten addressed his party’s disunity on Perth’s 6PR radio this morning, admitting there had been a difference in opinion among candidates, but says they were resolved when the party voted on the issue last year.

He said the Labor party had a “big argument” about asylum seekers policy at conference last year, “and I won that argument”.

“I think you’ll find a number of the comments contributed to candidates were made before we had that argument,” he said.

Mr Shorten failed to directly address his Mr Leadbetter’s comments when asked by News Corp Australia, but blamed the Prime Minister for Labor’s apparent struggle to keep a handle on the issue.

“This has been one of the big lies of Malcolm Turnbull during this election,” he said.

“He wants people to believe that somehow Labor is not equally committed to stopping the shameful people smuggling and criminal syndicates in southeast Asia, putting vulnerable people on boats and seeing them drown at sea.”

Mr Shorten said Labor would do “everything we can just like the Liberals will do to stop the evil people-smuggling trade”.

The opposition leader has faced division within his party with as many as two dozen candidates openly opposing Labor’s support of boat turn-backs.

Disunity on the issue was exposed last week when campaigned alongside Queensland ALP candidate Cathy O’Toole, who attended protests opposing her party’s border policies only three months ago.

Mr Shorten said the only difference between his and the Liberal Party’s stance on asylum seekers was Labor’s commitment to prioritise regional resettlement.

“The way you stop this evil trade is not by keeping people in indefinite detention on Manus and Nauru,” he said.

Originally published as Bill Shorten struggling to unite his party on asylum seeker policy