For Labor, the population debate is no political parlour game about whether Kevin Rudd was verballed when he spoke about a population of 36 million. The ALP are playing for keeps on the issue.

This flyer was distributed in the outer-Sydney/Blue Mountains electorate of Macquarie where Labor’s Susan Templeman, replacing Bob Debus, is taking on Louise Markus, who has shifted from Greenway. Part of this electorate includes the outer-suburban fringes of Sydney, exactly the areas Julia Gillard has targeted with her message that some areas can’t cope with continued population growth. The flyer was a thick, glossy, personally addressed mailout — expensive to print and dispatch.

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It achieves the rare feat for political advertising of attacking the party itself, or at least the party under that crazy man Kevin Rudd, he of “big Australia” and “arbitrary targets” (despite Rudd repeatedly insisting there was no target, merely a projection based on historic levels of immigration). Indeed, Rudd gets name checked in the document for explicit rejection. It’s now usual for NSW Labor to casually dispose of leaders, but it’s relatively novel that they should then campaign against them once they’ve been removed.

Like the language selected for use? “Stop and take a breath”. “Sustainable nation”. “Don’t hurtle towards a big Australia”, alongside the pleasantly smiling features of the new PM. Oh, and the “36 million” number that Gillard generously rounded up to 40 million has been left uncorrected.

If a leaflet bearing a similar message from John Howard had been dispatched in years past, he would have been savaged for dog-whistling — an act apparently beyond a Labor government even when it shifts to the Right on population and immigration issues.

The race to see who can be the party of Little Australia is on.