Reality bites on boats

THE commitment of Julia Gillard and Chris Bowen to the unfinalised bilateral agreement with Malaysia testifies to Labor's core ambition on asylum-seekers: to stop the boats and to ruin the people smugglers' business model.

These are high aspirations long thwarted. They mean Labor has proclaimed its goals to the world. It seeks a radical and tough outcome that repudiates the position of the Greens, the refugee lobby and human rights groups.

Labor is desperate for the Malaysian deal to succeed. Gillard and Bowen have talked up its significance and cannot afford another fiasco after the collapse of the promised East Timor processing centre.

At stake is Bowen's credibility and competence as Immigration Minister and Gillard's ability to salvage her position as a Prime Minister belatedly able to protect the borders.

Last week Bowen confessed that after the catastrophic Christmas Island boat disaster that claimed more than 30 lives he had "steeled my resolve" to win a "breakthrough" to stop such boat journeys.

Such realism from Labor is long overdue. In Australia's 110-year history no prime minister has succeeded on anything other than a border protection platform and this history is unlikely to change.

Labor's new hardline policy destroys many myths that riddle this debate. It establishes that Labor believes "pull" factors (government policy) are important in the flow of boats and the smuggling trade.

It embraces a new landmark in Labor's policy (at least covering 800 people) that denying boat arrivals any guarantee they will be either processed in Australia or settle in Australia is fundamental to the disincentive strategy. While limited, this is a huge step for Labor and would have been inconceivable in the Rudd era.

Above all, Bowen's policy seeks a new trade-off to purchase regional co-operation. It relocates boat arrivals to Malaysia for processing in return for increasing Australia's offshore refugee intake, thereby easing the net numbers and burden in Malaysia's system that numbers 93,000 refugees awaiting placement.

It is correct to say that the numbers, 800 outwards compared with 4000 inwards, is not a good deal for Australia. But that obscures the far bigger point that increasing the offshore program to win a major reduction in the onshore program (boat arrivals) would largely solve the political crisis providing - and this is the critical point - the deal actually worked and did break the people smugglers. This is the daunting and perhaps improbable task.

Bowen's initiative recognises that Australia's asylum-seeker policy has hit a dead-end. This debate, riddled with dogma and dishonesty, needs urgent new thinking. Indeed, while they are opponents, Bowen and opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison are searching for new approaches and share the view that a regional policy dictates more offshore processing.

In truth, the so-called Malaysian solution brings Labor far closer to the spirit of the Coalition's policy and more distant from the Greens. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, said Labor's plan breached international law. The Greens will not accept the removal of boat arrivals to Malaysia for processing. Attorney-General Robert McClelland confirms that Labor will rely upon Howard's post-Tampa laws to relocate the boatpeople. Bowen has declared: "I expect protests, I expect legal challenges, I expect resistance." He will be proved right on each count.

Morrison says Labor is trying to "buy a stairway" to Howard on a journey marked by denial, reversals and cost explosions. Labor is, he asserts, "flicking the switch to Howard lite" but brands the Malaysia deal as an act of "panic and desperation" that is "appallingly one-sided".

Labor's premature announcement that the two Prime Ministers had agreed on a bilateral arrangement yet to be finalised meant Gillard and Bowen put themselves under more pressure and weakened Australia's negotiating position with Malaysia. Bowen signalled new boat arrivals would be sent to Malaysia only to modify this to "another country".

Labor, at the same time, is negotiating with Papua New Guinea to accept more of the asylum-seeker burden. Malaysia, presumably, will insist upon its oversight rights in terms of the 800 boat arrivals it accepts from Australia for processing.

The Gillard-Bowen scramble to construct a new policy highlights two enduring realities. The key to Australia's border security lies in regional agreements. This was proved under both Malcolm Fraser and Howard and remains true today. Most boat people reaching Australia fly to Malaysia and transit via Indonesia. Co-operation with both nations is essential to terminate this trade.

It is also a fact that few regional nations have pledged to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and Australia cannot limit its options on regional processing deals to only those nations that have ratified the convention. Labor's backdown on this point is another sign of dawning realism.

In parliament on Monday, Bowen called the proposed agreement "innovative and bold" and predicted, yet again, it will "break the business model of the people smugglers." He told the media yesterday there were "no sticking points as such" with Malaysia. He repeated that "if you get on a boat from Indonesia to Australia you can work on the basis that you'll be sent back to Malaysia". For Labor, the stakes involved in this agreement are now huge.

For this agreement to work the trust and political co-operation between Australia and Malaysia must be tight. Whether the limit of 800 asylum-seekers being returned to Malaysia is sufficient is doubtful. Yet this deal, if viable, may become an important breakthrough.

The response of the pro-refugee Left is marked by hypocrisy. Bowen is offering the Left a deal - if fewer people come to Australia by boat then Australia will accept more offshore refugees from the region. Yes, more refugees. Isn't this worth two cheers? Listening to the Greens you would be forgiven for thinking the desired outcome is actually more boatpeople.

That's the problem with the Greens, the lawyers and the refugee lobby. They insist the only solution is full acceptance of boat arrivals but they won't contemplate the consequences, namely, the encouragement of more boats and the growth of the people smuggling industry to Australia. This industry is based upon people self-selecting Australia from other parts of the world. No Australian government, Liberal or Labor, will acquiesce before this industry and Bowen has got one big idea right, cutting off boat arrivals in a trade-off for a bigger offshore intake.