Quote of the Day - 27 July 2013

This one comes from Andrew Bolt, in the Herald Sun:

Same deal on boats. Abbott's promise to "stop the boats" in his first three years always seemed dodgy.
Too many are now coming and stopping them would take more toughness than the Senate, the courts and the media were likely to allow. But then came Rudd.
Desperate to fix a problem he caused by scrapping our tough border laws in 2008, Rudd promised something tougher than any politician before him.
All boat people as of last Friday would be sent to Papua New Guinea, he declared. None would ever settle in Australia.
With that, Rudd didn't just give Abbott the basis of a deal he himself could use in government. He also destroyed Labor's moral grandstanding.
As Opposition leader in 2006, Rudd preached that "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 . . . rely almost exclusively on the so-called Pacific Solution should be the cause of great ethical concern to all the Christian churches".
This same man now has Labor backing a Pacific Solution on steroids. Labor promises to send all boat people - mainly Muslim - to a poor, corrupt and violent country that bans homosexuality and unanimously passed a motion in Parliament to consider banning non-Christian faiths, too.
Could any Labor MP backing Rudd's plan today berate Abbott for being mean tomorrow to the "stranger in our midst"?
That Rudd's plan is already in tatters, less than a week later, will make Labor's objections to Abbott's plans seem even emptier.
Already more boat people - 355 - have arrived since Friday than there are beds left at the Manus detention centre, the one PNG facility ready to receive anyone.
Already another boat has sunk, with dozens feared dead.
Already PNG is suggesting there may be a cap to the boat people it accepts.
In other ways, too, Rudd has smoothed the way of a Prime Minister Abbott.

Kevin Rudd's back-flip on boat people is as insincere as it is unsurprising. Can anything that Kevin Rudd now says be taken seriously?

And let's not get started on the back-flip on Julia Gillard's much-reviled carbon tax...