Just pass the f---ing thing and repeal it when you are in power." That was the brutal advice from NSW Labor to then opposition leader Kim Beazley in 2001 after his fateful decision to oppose John Howard's Border Protection Bill, according to David Marr and Marian Wilkinson in Dark Victory.
Beazley had gone along with everything the Howard government had done in response to the Tampa crisis up until that point, when he ignored the advice and decided principle had to take precedence over electoral pragmatism.
Since then party leaders have been even more unwilling to argue an unpopular case, even if they believe it to be right, before an election.
If they find themselves on the wrong side of strong public opinion, the dilemma has been more how to manage the sideways crab walk to safer ground, and how to silence the policy purists in their own party.
Labor is crab-walking on the asylum issue right now. And the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, is very likely to pass Kevin Rudd's health reforms - no matter how flawed he considers them to be - to try to neutralise Labor's campaign theme on health.
At the height of the Oceanic Viking stand-off last year a few brave Labor souls dared to challenge the Rudd government's bob-each-way asylum policy. The secretary of the right-wing Australian Workers Union, Paul Howes, for one, said the ALP should "seize the moral high ground", fight the fear-mongering about refugees and let more of them in.
Five months later the government has shifted even further from the "fair" to the "tough" script in its dual-message policy on boat arrivals, suspending processing of Sri Lankans (for three months) and Afghanis (for six months) and this week reopening the Curtin detention centre in an arid backwater of Western Australia, even though it must be one of the most expensive onshore options for housing the would-be refugees.
The uncertainty of detention in a demountable at a disused air force base for an indefinite period (there is no guarantee processing will resume after the suspension) is apparently somehow more humane than detention for an indefinite period on Nauru.
Labor can't be sure it will deter more boats from turning up between now and the election, but Curtin is probably far enough from major population centres to deter publicity-attracting protesters.
And the brave Labor souls? Most have gone quiet.
The "Labor for Refugees" group fired off a letter to Rudd saying the suspension of processing was "a betrayal of Labor values and of the ALP national platform" and accusing the government of "dancing to the tune" of extreme elements of society.
Melissa Parke, the member for Fremantle, expressed concerns, and others say privately they will raise the issue in caucus when Parliament resumes. But almost everyone else, including MPs extremely uncomfortable with the new stance, has seen the public polling - Newspoll shows Abbott with an 18 percentage-point lead on who is best to handle the issue - and the private party polling, which shows the issue is biting hard, especially in seats like Lindsay in western Sydney, in Western Australia and in places where One Nation polled well, like regional Queensland.
If they needed any more evidence of how hard the Coalition intends to push the issue, there was Abbott responding to Rudd's COAG deal on health while standing in front of a "mobile billboard" on the back of a truck, which will drive around WA advertising how many boats have arrived on Labor's watch.
The Liberal organisation is cranking up a massive campaign, especially in WA, where direct mail is already being sent out to voters, citing departmental evidence to a Senate committee that each person housed on Christmas Island costs $82,000 to calculate that each boat arrival (average occupancy about 50) costs taxpayers more than $4 million. The mail-outs promise that the Liberal's policy (to reintroduce temporary protection visas and to "turn back boats where circumstances allowed") would end the boat people influx.
Meanwhile, Abbott is getting strong advice to do on health what the NSW Right advised Beazley to do on the border protection legislation.
Rudd's reforms are popular. He has a 13 per cent lead over Abbott on who is best to handle the issue.
But Abbott is a fighter, and his political instincts were to fight on health.
In his book Battlelines he noted that "in the run-up to the next election; there will be three big obstacles to big new policies in health and education: political operators' instinct not to 'play on your opponent's turf; opposition's tendency to let governments lose rather than take risks themselves; and the Coalition's traditional prudence with public money".
He then strongly suggested he didn't buy that advice. The Coalition needed specific policies to regain the faith of the voters "and even the most prudent governments should know when to spend as well as when to hoard".
And there are Western Australians arguing the Coalition should back that state's right to keep its GST, although their concerns could be allayed if the federal government does eventually do a special deal with the west.
But when shadow cabinet discussed the issue on Thursday it more or less decided the issue had to be neutralised, that Rudd should be left to explain his own complicated scheme but that a definitive position should be left to see how the situation in the west panned out.
Abbott's plausible policy alternative - 100 per cent federal funding and local boards - would be impossible to differentiate from Labor's scheme (dominant federal funding and local health networks) and would still involve the states running the day-to-day operations of the hospitals.
The fact that Rudd keeps raising - unprompted - the Coalition's opposition to the means test of the private health insurance rebate (a twice-rejected double dissolution election trigger that promises budget savings of $2.7 billion over four years) makes it pretty clear Labor wants to use Abbott's stance on health to undermine the Coalition attack on debt and deficit and wasteful spending (although after the insulation fiasco the wasteful spending attack is going to be pretty hard to defuse).
And a quick perusal of Labor's anti-Abbott website also makes it obvious Labor thinks it can use Abbott's five years as health minister to tie him to the health system's (poor) status quo.
Rudd is tossing overboard every piece of political ballast - addressing allegations of over-charging in building the education revolution, the debacle of an insulation program scrapped, tighter Foreign Investment Review Board rules for foreign home buyers allegedly flooding the market, promised childcare centres miraculously no longer needed because the government didn't get round to building them on time and the double drop-off apparently no longer dreaded by parents after all … the list goes on and on.
Abbott might be known as a conviction politician, unconventional and unafraid. But in an election year every leader is under extreme pressure to make like Rudd, and follow Richardson's advice, to do ''whatever it takes''.
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