Disclosure: With my (extended)family we have 5 Papuan refugees living with us here with bed, food, clothes, cars, computers, school fees and in my case in particular lots of guitars, CDs, concerts, music, booze and advice. They are all working as well as studying and rather than being burden on this society are a clear assett. The stories of ongoing persecution by the Indos and starvation in PNG camps are no joke.

Now I am against the Pacific Solution because it does not address the main issue. And it was an appalling precedent. Not giving people access to Australian law because Australian law is too generous invites the question – why not change the Australian law? For instance to reverse the onus of proof and limit appeals. This may mean formally withdrawing from the 1951 convention.

The Papuans are surely genuine refugees. They have papers and Australia is the first port of call. They are at risk. Indonesia have plenty of form. But once the excision precedent has been set it can be used for other reasons. It is heartening that the political tide is turning.

That’s certainly DIMA’s objective, but they never achieve it. According to the most recent update, the number of “non-program” humanitarian arrivals in 2005 was 11,669. Since to the best of my knowledge no illegal boat-borne applicants arrived during 2005 (the 43 Papuans arrived in January), we can reasonably assume that all of those 11,669 people arrived by air with valid visas and then made applications for protection or humanitarian visas. The number of visa-holding onshore asylum seekers has always dwarfed the number of illegal boat people arrivals. Typically around 12,000 of the former arrive every year, while the illegal boat people arrivals numbered in the hundreds throughout the 1990s, rose to 2000 or so from 1999-2002 and then fell back almost to zero after Tampa, Pacific Solution etc.

The bizarre thing about the visa-holding applicants, in contrast to the boat people arivals, is that the former have always been allowed to remain at large in the community while their protection visa aplications are processed and appeals heard, while the latter are kept in detention throughout. I’ve never really understood why we regard the boat people as a threat whereas the visa-holders aren’t. Or is it that we regard the boat people as cheats and queue jumpers and therefore morally unworthy? But surely the visa-holding arrivals are cheats and queue jumpers at least as much as the boat people. In many cases, they sought and obtained a tourist, student or other visa under false pretences, habouring a secret intention to apply for a protection visa once they reached Australia.

Of course these facts also impact Don Randall’s silly statement that “Australia’s legal system cannot deal with unauthorised arrivals on the mainland”. In fact our legal system has been dealing perfectly adequately (in the sense that neither politicians nor the public seem to have even noticed let alone commented) with the appeals and judicial review applications of the very much larger cohort of legal-arrival asylum seekers, as well as with the tiny number of illegal arrivals. Why would giving legal appeal and judicial review rights to a few dozen (or even a few hundred) illegal boat arrivals cause insurmountable problems for the legal system when giving exactly the same rights to 12,000 legal arrivals every year apparently causes no problems at all? It simply confirms (if any confirmation was needed) that Howard’s aborted expanded Pacific solution legislation had everything to do with pandering to Indonesian sensibilities and very little to do with sensible, humane management of policy.