A government that can't protect borders will fall

Kudelka cartoon

IT is a sad story. Julia Gillard now has an asylum-seeker policy she admits will mean more boatpeople arrivals, and Tony Abbott has a "stop the boats" policy that the Immigration Department openly says cannot work.

Announcing her humiliating backdown last Thursday, Gillard said: "I do want to say this: we are at a real risk of seeing more boats, and I understand this will cause community anxiety." Her conclusion is right on both counts, and condemns her own policy.

Gillard has now reached a stage of permanent humiliation. She stands for a policy she cannot implement, and she warns that the policy she has been forced to adopt is doomed to fail. This is a recipe for political and policy disaster. The Prime Minister wears her humiliation like a badge. Labor's asylum-seeker policy is untenable.

Have no doubt, however, that Gillard does not accept her defeat. This is clear from her public comments. The tenacity Gillard displayed on carbon pricing will be repeated on asylum-seekers.

What, pray, will Gillard say when more boats come? She will blame Abbott, and say the solution lies in her legislation that sits on the parliamentary table.

Gillard will present as a champion of offshore processing. Indeed, she will present Labor as the party of offshore processing, temporarily thwarted by Abbott and the Greens. What happens if another boat sinks with major loss of life? Expect Gillard to condemn her opponents and re-submit her legislation. Obviously, at the next election she will campaign for offshore processing and seek a mandate to revive her policy and her legislation. Anyone who doubts this should read the comments at her extraordinary media conference last Thursday. At the outset, Gillard declared her government remained committed to the Malaysian deal, saying she believed "it is the best policy", that it maximised deterrence, that it was born of a proper regional process under the Bali Framework, that she still wanted it implemented and that her government would keep pressing the opposition to pass the bill.

These are hardly the words of a Prime Minister marching meekly to defeat. If the Left thinks it has won the internal Labor Party battle, it needs to think again. Gillard, along with Immigration Minister Chris Bowen, believes the executive needs the power to make such offshore arrangements. This is the core principle at stake, and Gillard is right. She is likely to insist on this principle as tantamount to Labor's identity. The risk is apparent. The implicit split within Labor between border protectionists and humanitarian acceptionists is now explicit, more emotional and more dangerous than ever. It is reflected in the "two strands" policy that Labor is now stuck with.

In effect, Gillard now has dual policies -- the policy in which she believes that cannot be legislated, and the policy imposed on her by a parliament she does not control. When Bowen proposed in cabinet a compromise package involving processing on Nauru, he wasn't running up the white flag. Bowen's fallback was to allow asylum-seekers to be sent to both Nauru and Papua New Guinea in return for getting the legislation passed, knowing this would allow the Malaysian deal as well.

His argument was not that Abbott would necessarily accept it, but that Abbott's opposition would look more untenable in political terms. It was hardly a surprise Gillard said no. She had demonised Nauru, and any such backdown would have been immense and damaging. The truth is the Bowen compromise, if it was to be offered, should have been offered immediately after the High Court decision. This is when Abbott did waver. At that moment. Labor's offering him Nauru, PNG and Malaysia together would have had a chance. It would have meant that whenever Abbott cried "We want Nauru", Labor would have replied "Yes, let's vote on it now."

In the cabinet debate, Kevin Rudd lined up with Gillard, not the Labor Right, which means the Right has no argument for switching to Rudd as leader in quest of a tougher boat policy. Understand, however, the real policy dynamics in Labor's new cabinet position. It is premised on a fundamental reality: unless the boats are halted or checked, the existing mandatory detention system becomes unsustainable. That is, if you want tight mandatory detention you need offshoring processing. And if you don't get offshoring processing then you get more asylum-seekers living in the community. And, you guessed it, that's because of Tony Abbott too.

Labor has decided it cannot expand the detention centres indefinitely. It has a community detention model mainly for children and families. It will now expand the system of bridging visas applied to asylum-seekers arriving by air to the boatpeople, so that after they undergo health and security checks they can live in the community, probably with working rights. The Greens and sections of the Labor Left see this as a de facto victory.

The future, however, will be determined by the flow of boats. It always is. More boats will heighten the blame game and provoke public demands to stop such arrivals. The Coalition will be the beneficiary, briefly.

These events reveal a failure of Australia's system of government. One of the cardinal responsibilities of any Australian government is to protect the borders, and every PM since Federation has been a border protectionist.

That responsibility has now been compromised, and the consequences will be severe. Gillard can be rightly accused of poor tactics, but her offshore policy has been destroyed by forces beyond her control -- the High Court, Abbott and the Greens.

The fury of many senior Labor figures at Abbott's tactics will endure. Abbott as PM will get nothing, but nothing, from the parliament. His policy has three legs: Nauru, temporary protection visas and turning the boats back with Jakarta's co-operation. The Immigration Department says none of them will work. The department says the Malaysian model is the answer, and in effect that Abbott's thinking about stopping the boats is obsolete. The Coalition is storing up for itself a litany of woes in office, and will live to regret its defeat of Gillard's legislation.

Both Labor and the Coalition support offshoring processing. It is sanctioned under regional arrangements. There are various regional governments prepared to enter such agreements with Australia. But because of an unwise High Court judgment, the parliament was required to legislate to re-empower the executive to enter such agreements. This it has failed to do.

By its rejection, this parliament has betrayed the national interest, dismissed public opinion and shown contempt for the legitimate expectation of the Australian public that its government will protect their borders. Ultimately, any Australian government that fails this test will fall.