Kevin Rudd is fooling nobody with his revisionist history

HOW stupid does Kevin Rudd think we are? He was no champion of asylum seekers, despite his attempts this week to pretend otherwise, writes James Morrow.

KEVIN Rudd has the memory of an elephant. The problem is, he thinks the rest of us have the memory of a goldfish.

How else to explain Rudd’s bizarre excursion on Fran Kelly’s RN Breakfast on Thursday to have a chat about asylum seekers?

In a rewriting of history that can only be described as Orwellian, Rudd — author of the PNG Solution when he was in government — told listeners that the Coalition should have settled Manus Island asylum seekers in Australia three years ago.

Which is lovely except for the fact that back in 2013, Rudd announced that asylum seekers who arrived by boat would “never be settled in Australia”.

Never mind, said Rudd, he didn’t really mean that, he meant they only should have been kept in detention for 12 months before being resettled and he was just trying to “send a clear message to people smugglers”.

In any case, that’s the goldfish. Here’s the elephant.

Kevin Rudd is fast becoming the kind of problem for Bill Shorten that Tony Abbott is for Malcolm Turnbull. (Pic: Gary Ramage)

Put aside for a moment Rudd’s rather loose 2013-era definition of “never”, a term he apparently uttered with as much sincerity as Meatloaf’s promise to “love you to the end of time”.

Bill Shorten, listening to the former PM chat to Fran Kelly, would surely have been reminded of Rudd’s old saying about rodent fornication.

Shorten, after all, is for the moment an odds-on favourite to walk into the Lodge come the next election.

And perhaps the only thing he needs less than someone coming along reminding people to think about the words “Labor” and “boat people” in the same sentence is someone reviving memories of Bill Shorten as one of the “faceless men” who helped topple Rudd back in 2010.

The events of June 23, 2010, which were in no small part instigated by Shorten and other factional powerbrokers, tipped Australia into a period of leadership instability that has seen the country through seven years and nearly as many governments.

While it may be too early to place a hedging bet on a Turnbull win, the Labor leader should remember that Rudd never forgets.

James Morrow is the Daily Telegraph opinion editor.