"The government would not have required this patch or bandaid if they had dealt with the matter appropriately in the first instance, but they failed to," Ms Gillard said.
"Why did they fail to? We all know, and the Labor Party has consistently said, that the so-called Pacific Solution was more about getting a solution to get the government through to election day, and for however long they could sustain it beyond election day, rather than being a comprehensive long-term solution to the issue of asylum seekers.
"The fact that it was conceived in haste, that it was implemented in haste and that its primary purpose was for electoral advantage rather than being an appropriate and proper public policy instrument in dealing with the question of asylum seekers is now very clearly starting to show.
"The public imagery that the government has always used in relation to the so-called Pacific Solution is that these asylum seekers would never, under any circumstances, set foot on Australian soil. That has been what the government has always claimed - that has been its whole imagery. The government engaged in the so-called Pacific Solution because it was going to be tough on the question of who came to Australia and it was going to keep asylum seekers off Australian soil and put them on Manus Island and Nauru."
The Prime Minister said a whole lot of other things likely to echo uncomfortably in coming months, given she held the shadow immigration portfolio from November 2001 to July 2003.
There is this from October 2002, "the so-called Pacific Solution continues to degenerate into a farce worthy of the stage".
And this from August of the same year, "I grieve today for the failure of the Howard government to design and implement a comprehensive long-term policy to deal with refugee and asylum seeker issues".
And how will she answer the questions she raised about the sustainability of this option in June 2002:
"I do not think that anybody in this place - including government members - could come into this place and say with any degree of credibility that they believe the so-called Pacific Solution is going to last for 10, 20 or 50 years.
"Instead of engaging in an unsustainable sideshow, which is what the so-called Pacific Solution is, why don't we fix the thing that is really the problem? The thing that is really the problem is the Australian processing arrangement."
And what response will she have to the multiple positions her Government has held if someone recalls these words:
"Then they did the flip and we had the post-Tampa strategy-the so-called Pacific Solution. Then they did the flop and, in April, we had the long-term detention strategy for Australia. Then, by May, they were in a double somersault forward to the May budget strategy, which was different from the April strategy of some 34 days before. Now they have done the backflip and the double roll and we have the new excision strategy. When you settle down and think that you have a long-term plan, then we will stand ready to back it-and you understand what we are prepared to back. If you need to fix Australian processing to make it faster then Labor stand ready to do that too. What we will not do is to play cheapjack political opportunism with you"