Planet Janet Albrechtsen has a fairly lacklustre attack on the Ruddster and religion in today’s Oz, asserting that German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer — whom Rudd rates as a hero — would be shocked shocked at St Kevin’s use of religion for photo ops, etc. Anyone’s who’s read Bonhoeffer would know that Planet doesn’t have a clue what she’s talking about — Dietrich B (who wrote in prison that “increasingly I find myself drawn to atheists rather than the overtly religious”) would be amused but hardly shocked at Rudd’s Popish photo ops. Bonhoeffer, after all, was more interested in the real than the symbolic, giving the Nazi salute in public right up to the moment when he was arrested.

What he’d find harder to stomach is professed Christians such as Peter Costello and Tony Abbott supporting a regime that appealed to the public based on the efficiency and thoroughness of its cruelty to refugee detainees. Bonhoeffer was, after all, a people smuggler, helping Jews escape to Switzerland. Such people were condemned by the Swiss after 1943, when a crackdown on such entries occurred. The slogan used by the Swiss? “Our lifeboat is full.” That ring any notes in your belfry, Planet?