Photo: Protesters supporting the plight of asylum seekers gather outside the Labor Caucus meeting in Balmain, Sydney, on July 22, 2013. (ABC News: Ellesa Throwden)
Kevin Rudd's lurch to the right on asylum seekers is not pretty, but if the boats do stop, he will be forgiven much, even by the humanitarians who are now his sternest critics, writes Mungo MacCallum.
So the great asylum seeker debate is officially over.
No more bleeding hearts versus hardliners. No more do-gooders against xenophobes. And no more compassion seeking to moderate pragmatism.
From now on the policy is clear, bipartisan and brutal: keep the bastards out. For those who have come across the seas, our boundless plains are not for sharing.
Instead of coming to Australia, the 10th richest country in the world, asylum seekers are to be shunted off to Papua New Guinea, the 139th. They may not be happy about it, but that is just the point: let them rot in the camps of Indonesia. Or if possible even further away. Just stop the boats.
And it might; not, as Rudd admits, immediately, but if and when the government is seen to be serious - ruthless - about the new policy, risking one's life and money to exchange one hell hole for another could well cease to be a gamble worth taking.
Even Tony Abbott reckons that it is not a bad idea, although of course he is quick to add that it will never work under Kevin Rudd. And as a political solution it is simple and elegant: a concrete plan with a far better chance of success than anything Abbott and his unwholesome immigration spokesman Scott Morrison have proposed.
But that does not mean that even by its own pragmatic standards it will be trouble free. For starters, there is the cost; we have not yet been told just what is entailed, but it will not be less than an arm and a leg. Of course, we will save much of the money now spent on facilities at home, and, assuming the boats stop or at least ease off, the resources, effort and angst of the Navy acting as a coastguard. But by the time we have paid off the government in Port Moresby and assumed the ongoing expenses associated with Manus Island, there will be another big hole in the budget.
Then there are the politics: the current PNG prime minister Peter O'Neill may be happy about the arrangement but elements of his splintered opposition are not, and governments in our nearest neighbour have a habit of changing somewhat unpredictably.
And the ongoing situation is not all that promising. The locals do not generally welcome uninvited intruders, especially if they are Asian and/or Muslim. And PNG already has a refugee problem of its own: unlike Australia, the country has a land border, which some 9,000 desperate people have crossed fleeing persecution in Irian Jaya. Given its own straitened economy, the residents may be forgiven for feeling they already do enough for the cause without making an open-ended commitment to their former colonial master.
And in any case, things are far from locked up; there is certain to be a challenge to the legislation in Australia's High Court, which knocked back Julia Gillard's Malaysia solution. The current plan has more chance of success - unlike Malaysia, PNG is a signatory to the UN Convention on Refugees, for what that is worth. But Rudd still has a few hoops to jump through before he can claim to have put this most vexing of political problems to bed.
Still, he has to be given marks for trying. On any level the current situation was out of control. With more than 15,000 boat people having arrived already this year and no sign of relief in sight, circumstances had indeed changed since 2008, when Rudd happily dismantled John Howard's Pacific solution. The drownings were becoming commonplace, despite the best efforts of an increasingly traumatised Navy, and the caps were overflowing.
And worst of all, the politics had become worse than toxic: with Abbott's uncompromising and opportunistic stance there was a real danger that the election could turn into nasty brawl about race, even worse than Howard's dark victory of 2001. Rudd's lurch to the right was not pretty, but if it works and the boats do stop, he will be forgiven much, even by the humanitarians who are now his sternest critics.
And there may even be a bright side. The influx of successful asylum seekers had meant that almost all of Australia's 20,000 allocated places for immigrant refugees have been filled by boat people - the situation of those confined to the camps with neither the resources nor the recklessness to employ a people smuggler has drifted further into despair.
Now there is a chance that those places will open up again, and Rudd has signalled that if things work out, he will increase them by another 7,000. There has never been a queue, as such, but there have always been many thousands hoping against hope that their numbers will eventually come up. If the PNG solution comes off, their chances will improve significantly.
But it is not the solution many would have wanted. It is easy to sympathise with the Greens' Christine Milne, who dubbed it a day of shame. But it would be more accurate to talk of 12 years of shame, starting at the time of the Tampa, when the majority of Australians applauded John Howard as he thundered: "Those people will never set foot on Australian soil - never!" In fact, a lot of them later did, but the mood was set - a mood Rudd is now reinforcing.
Unlike the countries of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, where most asylum seekers arrive on foot, Australia is girt by sea. And we have an atavistic dread of unauthorised maritime arrivals - the boats, however harmless, are always seen as some kind of invasion, a threat to our way of lives.
When it comes to asylum seekers, this appears an absurd exaggeration, but perhaps, just perhaps, it is not entirely irrational. After all, it has happened before. Just ask the Indigenous Australians.
Mungo Wentworth MacCallum is a political journalist and commentator. View his full profile here.
Australia's boundless plains no longer for sharing - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
