Julia Gillard's Non Malaysian Solution: Another Labor Mess
Posted on Wednesday, 31 August 2011
Today's High Court ruling preventing the Government from implementing their Malaysian people swap is a devastating blow for an incompetent government that simply can't get anything right.
This is a Government that lurches from one self-made crisis to the next, whether it is pink batts, the NBN, live cattle or border protection, it is just one bungle after another. This is a Government mired in incompetence.
Julia Gillard's Malaysian non-solution, now joins her East Timor non-solution and Labor's failed asylum freeze policies as yet another example of Labor's inability to get anything right in this area.
Having abandoned the Coalition's successful policies, Labor have unleashed a wave of policy failure that has brought more than 12,000 people on 240 boats.
The decision shows once again how the Government failed to think their policy through.
Having been condemned by both Houses of Parliament, the Malaysian deal has now been struck down by the High Court.
The court has found that the architecture of the Migration Act to be sound, but the Minister has failed to get it right. In desperate haste to pursue an “anything but Nauru” strategy, the Minister has cobbled together a poorly negotiated agreement with Malaysia that has simply failed the test.
In Julia Gillard's year of delivery, the Government has hopelessly failed to deliver.
As the Coalition has consistently argued, the protections required under the Act simply do not exist in Malaysia. By contrast, the judgement draws a distinction with the Coalition's arrangements with Nauru, where a positive assessment is made about the protections in place which are only made stronger by Nauru's decision to sign the Refugee convention.
While the High Court’s decision will stop asylum seekers being sent to Malaysia it will sadly not stop the continued blowout in costs or the crisis in our detention network that is the product of the Government's policy failures to date.
With more than four critical incidents occurring on average every day, another detention centre fire in Darwin, and costs now exceeding $1 billion a year, there is already an appalling legacy from the Government's existing policy failures, before the collapse of yet another bungled policy from this Government.
Labor has been exposed time and again as having neither the competency or consistency to implement border protection policies that work and are supported by Australians.
By contrast the Coalition has the record, resolve and policies to stop the boats and restore the integrity of our refugee programme. Unlike Labor, the Australian people know where the Coalition stands and, importantly, so do the people smugglers.
31 August 2011