Thanks to the High Court, Julia Gillard essentially has only two asylum-seeker policy options: reinstate a Pacific Solution 2.0 with Tony Abbott’s help or abandon offshore processing altogether.
Abbott offered his bipartisan support on re-establishing processing centres on Nauru and Manus Island, Papua New Guinea — which would involve changing Australian law, since currently the High Court is suggesting that all offshore processing is illegal.
It would be seen as an about-face for Gillard and would also be difficult in a practical sense, since there are a variety of legal hurdles the government would need to jump over. David Marr explains more in The Sydney Morning Herald:
“Nauru has now joined PNG as a signatory to the refugee conventions. But that is not enough, the Solicitor-General says. They also have to have laws that ”ensure practical compliance” with their obligations and they must comply ”in practice with human-rights standards acceptable at least to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees”…
… Those laws have to be seen to work in practice. PNG has an unhappy record dealing with refugees from west Papua. And how will remote little Nauru find refugees to practise on? Australia can’t send out a starter kit of asylum seekers. Where will the first batches come from?”
