Rudd’s ‘tough but humane’ bob each way rhetoric on asylum seekers was always a crock but hey worth a try and great if you can get away with it. Today’s newspoll shows that he hasn’t got away with it.
Of course, Rudd could hope that this newspoll is an outlier and the damage is not serious.
More likely, he will have to turn the nob on the dial more in the direction of ‘tough’.
I suspect the people switching votes on this issue are the old howard battlers (socially conservative working class types who feel threatened rather than uplifted by migrants from other cultures moving into their neighbourhoods), a group Rudd did so much to court at the last election and to which he is particularly sensitised.
It won’t be pretty.
Rudd decided not to try and show leadership on this issue, and rise above the intuitive racism of many Australian voters, now he will be mired in the bog.
