For a determined Opposition Leader, all roads lead to turning back asylum-seeker boats

DESPITE the gloss of bipartisanship over Nauru, the split between the Gillard government and Abbott opposition over border protection and asylum-seekers is now more obvious in its depth, range and fateful consequences.

If you think this week solved the political divisions over border protection then you are misguided. This issue will only deepen as a public policy cancer because there is little prospect the boats will be stopped.

At lunchtime on Thursday, before the compromise bill to allow offshore processing at Nauru and Papua New Guinea had even passed the parliament, Tony Abbott was bagging the new policy that he had long advocated. His charge was that Labor lacked the "heart" (he means guts) to enforce a tough position.

"My fear with this government is that its heart is just not in it," the Opposition Leader said.

"(Labor) don't have it in themselves to do what's necessary to make this happen."

Abbott even cast doubt on whether Labor was capable of sending asylum-seekers to Nauru. "I'll believe it when I see it," he said. "Let's see whether it can successfully get illegal boat arrivals on to Nauru."

This is high-risk rhetoric. It undermines Julia Gillard's new stand. It suggests Australia remains a "soft touch". It virtually sabotages the new bipartisan Nauru-PNG offshore processing policy because that policy, to be effective, means smugglers and boatpeople must be convinced Australia has embraced a new and ruthless position.

Abbott is playing, again, unforgiving domestic politics on boats. In fact, he doesn't believe that the Prime Minister's new policy based on Nauru and PNG will work. He is sure that Labor's soft image on boats is too entrenched to be repackaged. This, however, is not the real point.

The real point is not Abbott disputing Gillard's mettle -- it is that he disagrees with the strategy of the Houston report released last Monday. This reveals the depth of the contemporary Australian crisis over people movement. Gillard, in a position of utter weakness, embraced in principle the entire report chaired by former defence force chief Angus Houston, with two other panel members, former Foreign Affairs chief Michael L'Estrange and prominent refugee advocate Paris Aristotle.

For Labor, any other decision would have been a calamity. This laid the basis for the short-term deal with Abbott to reopen centres in Nauru and PNG. But Abbott, unlike Gillard, did not embrace the Houston report. This is because during the past year the Coalition has decisively turned against the wider regional framework involving Malaysia and Indonesia that lies at the heart of Houston's report. In office, Abbott has no intention of enshrining this strategy.

This is the reality, despite his cordial briefing from the Houston panel last Monday.

Abbott told Inquirer he was sceptical of the recommendation to lift the humanitarian intake immediately to 20,000 and later to 27,000. His fear is that it would become a "magnetic force" attracting even more asylum-seekers to the region.

He is as hostile as ever to Labor's Malaysia Solution, whose principles won endorsement from the Houston panel as basic to a wider regional deal. Abbott stands by the Coalition policy of rejecting offshore processing in nations that have not signed the Refugee Convention, a position Houston and L'Estrange attacked because it would cripple any viable deal between Australia and Southeast Asian nations.

In office, Abbott will face immediate pressure to halt the boats -- pressure and expectations that he has created. He cannot wait years to negotiate and implement the protracted diplomacy Houston envisages.

What is Abbott's alternative? It remains the policy he outlined to me in an interview published on January 21. Abbott said: "It is time for Australia to adopt turning the boats as its core policy. What counts is what the Australian government does, not what it says."

Despite almost universal commentary that it is impossible, Abbott intends to turn the boats. This is his real solution.

Abbott says Indonesia is the first nation he will visit as PM. He would seek to strike a deal. He has pledged to increase aid to Indonesia. The incentives will be hefty. But the bottom line is unconditional: he intends to send back the boats and the asylum-seekers.

There will be no compromise on this. Abbott believes that Jakarta, devoid of trust in the Labor government, has turned a blind eye to the problem.

This stance defies the Canberra policy establishment even more dramatically than Abbott's December 2009 repudiation of carbon pricing, his first defining position as Liberal leader.

Abbott may be proved right. It is dangerous to underestimate his judgment when he defies conventional wisdom. His position on the boats, however, conflicts with every policy department: Prime Minister and Cabinet, Foreign Affairs and Trade, Immigration, Customs and Border Protection, the leadership of the Australian Defence Force and, of course, Houston and L'Estrange, both trusted advisers to John Howard.

The logic behind Abbott's policy is irrefutable -- having worked during the past 12 months to destroy the regional approach, the tow-back is his final decisive option.

The ultimate gamble for Abbott as PM will not be his long-canvassed carbon tax repeal but halting the boats. In office Abbott will be cut no slack -- he has systematically attacked every alternative to his own policy, alienated Labor and the Greens, told the world only he has the answer and this week led a gloating Coalition in celebrating Labor's ignominy in reopening Nauru.

It was frequently said this week after the Houston report that the region would not do a deal with Australia on asylum-seekers. This is manifestly false. Indeed, it is the reverse of the situation. Malaysia signed an unprecedented deal negotiated by Immigration Minister Chris Bowen, where it was prepared to have boatpeople from Australia flown to the region for offshore processing.

That deal was destroyed, not in Malaysia but in Australia. It was not the region that refused to deal with Australia but Australia that was unready to deal with the reality of Southeast Asia.

It was destroyed because it was found to be unacceptable to our legal and political values. Having been rejected by the High Court, that rejection was affirmed by our parliament with Abbott the main instigator of this rejection, supported by the Greens.

The lesson can be stated precisely -- Australia decided the region does not meet the human rights standards we demand and, having drawn that patronising line, it is hard to imagine how our political system escapes from this self-engineered trap. We have constructed a barrier to asylum-seeker co-operation between ourselves and the region.

This leads to the central dilemma in the Houston report -- it wants the Malaysian principle applied more broadly (we take more offshore refugees from the region and the region, in turn, agrees to allow our boat arrivals to be processed offshore) yet it concedes the human rights guarantees negotiated with Malaysia are not sufficiently strong and must be improved.

Houston's report said the Malaysia Solution, despite its flaws, was of "great significance" and a "potential building block" for a regional framework.

Yet Abbott and Scott Morrison, representing the alternative government, have vetoed this strategy during the past year. They vetoed the strategy under Labor and they reject the strategy under the Coalition. All roads, therefore, lead to turning the boats.

Yet the Houston report is highly sceptical, indeed alarmed, about any "boat turning" policy. Its conclusion is that the conditions "required for effective, lawful and safe turn-backs of irregular vessels headed for Australia with asylum-seekers on board are not currently met in regard to turn-backs to Indonesia".

The report says the essential conditions necessary to make such a policy viable are the consent of the receiving state and approval of the state in which the vessel was registered -- such action to be consistent not just with international law and Australian law but with the "safety of life at sea" convention.

Abbott and Morrison seized on the report's statement that boat turning "can be operationally achieved" and "can constitute an effective disincentive" given the above qualifications. Suffice to say turning boats will be an immense legal, political, diplomatic and public relations exercise for an Abbott government. But anybody who thinks Abbott is not serious does not know his character.

The common assumption that Abbott is just kidding overlooks several factors. He keeps saying it. He has not changed his mind. He is aware of the obstacles. He is not discouraged by the Houston report. He argues the report validates his position. And, above all, he has no other policy option that stands a chance of working in the near term.

Abbott and his senior colleagues will visit Indonesia soon. Their mission is to build trust ahead of the demands imposed on Australia-Indonesia ties after the election of a Coalition government. Meanwhile this week's parliamentary deal offered little hope for optimism. Labor is a morally beaten party, forced by the unacceptable surge of boats to admit its folly and embrace policies it has long denounced. Abbott is right to think Labor lacks the ruthlessness to follow through.

The Greens are revealed as the party of moral vanity, deeply alienated from the values and concerns of the Australian people and blind to the need to halt the boats. And most of the Coalition, dancing on the grave of Labor's retreat, seemed oblivious to the consequences of its own policies and the vast challenge it faces immediately on taking office.