“Offshore processing and regional resettlement together with the Coalition’s policy of turnbacks is what actually stopped the boats”.
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“He’s trying to get asylum seeker boats off the agenda by admitting Labor made a mistake by not turning back boats to Indonesia under the Rudd and Gillard governments”. Mr Marles said it asylum seeker policy was the “hardest debate” in the Labor party and in public policy.
But I do think there will be a lot of people this morning asking whether they will be able to vote for Labor.
“No group of people in all of modern Australian history have done more to guarantee safety at work, to build national wealth, to lift the living standards of ordinary people, no-one has done more than our unions, and 10,000 royal commissions won’t change that fact”, he said.
Shorten refused to quantify how many lives were lost because Labor did not embrace turn-backs in government, instead blaming Tony Abbott for opposing Labor’s solution of sending boat arrivals to Malaysia.
Mr Shorten confirmed the policy when approached by Fairfax Media, branding his renewables policy the “centre-piece of our response to the challenge of climate change”.
It is likely Shorten and immigration spokesman Richard Marles will argue turn-backs are permitted under the platform to go before the conference, though they are not explicitly mentioned.
A 3AW caller labelled Mr Shorten “Back-flip Bill”.
Mr Shorten also set Labor a target, by 2025, of having 50 per cent representation of women MPs in Parliament.
The opposition leader told 400 delegates in Melbourne today a Labor government would roll out a globally-linked emissions trading scheme and seek support for a republic and same-sex marriage.
She predicted that the numbers would be “very tight” if Rainbow Labor backed a binding vote.
A loss for Mr Shorten would nearly certainly be fatal for his leadership.
Victorian MP Anna Burke said a few voters would be reconsidering their support for Labor.
While the party’s platform won’t be rewritten to specifically include turnbacks, Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese told a Left faction gathering on Thursday he has real concerns about the announcement by Mr Shorten.
Former Queensland premier Peter Beattie – who chairs the Australia-Israel Labor Dialogue (AILD), which promotes cooperation between the ALP and its Labour counterpart in Israel – said at AILD’s launch in February that there was an “annoying lack of sensible dialogue in the ALP” on Israel.
“A much longer-term commitment to renewable energy will ensure that projects can continue to attract necessary finance up to and beyond 2020, and that exciting new technologies like large-scale solar, geothermal and ocean energy have the opportunity to contribute to Australia’s energy mix as they become increasing competitive over the next decade”.
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Party members in NSW already have a 100 per cent say in lower house preselections.
