By ABC's Tracee Hutchison

Posted Sat Jul 20, 2013 10:11pm AEST

Photo: Is Kevin Rudd's new asylum policy a political coup or a violation of the protocols of the Refugee Convention?

Kevin Rudd's latest, increasingly Right-shifting incarnation of John Howard's Pacific Solution, is a Houdini-like manoeuvre that delivers the Labor Party a political check mate, writes Tracee Hutchison.

If Australia was not a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention Kevin Rudd's announcement that the country would effectively cease to observe its protocols - by shifting the burden of asylum seekers arriving by boat to Papua New Guinea - could well have been viewed as quite the political coup.

Except that Australia is a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention, the fine print of which Rudd had already indicated his Government would scrutinise for wriggle room before the joint communiqué cum photo-op with PNG Prime Minister Peter O'Neill rendered Australia's obligations to the Convention somewhat unconventional, to say the least.

The Convention, as a comprehensive explainer for The Conversation by Monash University's Azadeh Dastyari set out, was drafted post WW2 in response to the Holocaust to ensure no country ever turned its back again on vulnerable people fleeing persecution. Australia signed up in 1954. Robert Menzies was prime minister and his signature committed Australia as a stakeholder of its aspirations.

But in stitching up this deal with PNG, Australia has certainly pushed out a boat of its own on the interpretation of what being a signatory to the Convention actually means in the modern context.

And in flexing its considerable regional muscle, armed no doubt with a very fat cheque book, Australia has off-loaded what the Government has itself labelled its politically poisonous problem to one of our poorest neighbours. (Which is really saying something, given PNG already sits at the top of Australia's aid recipient list).

This latest, increasingly Right-shifting, incarnation of John Howard's Pacific Solution has moved Australia's asylum seeker debate into unchartered waters.

To a place most Australians might know by name at best, but would be hard-pressed to find on a map. Manus Island is about 300 kilometres north of the PNG mainland, just south of the equator, a little dot on the map in the middle of the Admiralty Islands.

On an island of around 40,000 people, the Australian government's immigration processing facility has been big business.

A very large and juicy carrot on an island where subsistence farming and fishing can only go so far at the local markets. Expanding the Manus facility – at Australia's behest – to a capability of 3,000 is a boon for the local economy, which welcomed the re-opening of the detention centre when former prime minister Julia Gillard announced it in 2011.

Back then, Peter Poiou from the Manus Chamber of Commerce and Industry told the ABC's PNG correspondent Liam Fox that re-opening of the Manus facility would have some major benefits: "Particularly, to the hospitality industry, hotels, and the guesthouses, and to stores, to local markets, and generally to the people of Manus", Poiou said.

The Australian government literally lined the streets with gold, well, OK, bitumen.

The roads were fixed, new schools were built and the airport tarmac re-surfaced. Concerns of local landholders were appeased by Australia's deep pockets while the concerns of refugee advocates and the Australian Greens about conditions that amounted to rows of army tents in the blistering equatorial sun and high humidity went largely unheeded.

In palming off Australia's most vexing and contentious of policy challenges, Kevin Rudd has pulled off a Houdini-like manoeuvre – an out of sight and out of mind solution coupled with a political check mate.

And it came as a new maxim entered the debate, introduced with a fair dose of clinical dexterity by Foreign Minister Bob Carr, that asylum seekers were no longer merely queue jumpers but they also had the audacity to aspire to a better life as economic refugees. Gosh, who would have thought?

The Australia/PNG Refugee Accord (if it has such a name) capped off a good week for the Australian Government and a bad one for anyone aspiring to a better life who happened to have fled persecution but didn't have time to stop off at the local passport office before departure.

Tick this box and take a number if you're part of a persecuted minority in any of the following countries:

1. Sri Lanka, 2, Afghanisitan, 3. Iran and 4. Vietnam, circa 1975 did you say?

That the PNG development came in the wake of the Indonesian Government's burden-sharing announcement to tighten immigration controls for people entering that country from Iran was another diplomatic feather in Rudd's re-fitted prime ministerial cap.

But the ink was barely dry on the PNG Solution when news filtered through from the other Pacific problem-solving partner, of a full-scale riot in the detention centre in Nauru.

It was an unfortunate, unrelated coincidence according to the Refugee Action Coalition's Ian Rintoul who said the protest was over the slow processing of claims had been planned for several days.

"The tension has built significantly," Rintoul said. "The recent arrivals, pushed into circumstances where it's even more crowded, all the added uncertainty about delays, every now and then reaches breaking point."

It was grist for the mill for those on both sides of politics who would like very much for this poisonous problem to go away.

And with the UN Refugee Convention now firmly in Rudd's political crosshairs, just where the PNG Solution leaves Robert Menzies' near-60 year old signature is yet to be determined.

The only clear winner was politics.

Tracee Hutchison broadcasts Australia/Asia/Pacific for ABC News Radio and Radio Australia. View her full profile here.

An unconventional take on the Refugee Convention - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)