If there is anything emblematic about the tragedy of the Rudd/Gillard governments, if there is anything that sums up just how the country has been firebombed by the Labor bunglers it would have to be asylum seeker policy.
Under the Howard government we had a policy - the Pacific Solution - which worked. Temporary protection visas, being housed on Nauru and offshore processing. Illegal queue-jumpers and the people smugglers had the sugar taken off the table, our lucrative welfare benefits were out of reach, the bleeding heart human rights industry and its opportunistic spiv lawyers were put out of business and the Left were nobbled. Everything was just fine.
Then along came Labor.
In August 2008 with the whole asylum seeker issue off the agenda, with no more boats coming, with just one person in detention and the issue now an asterisk in the history books, Kevin Rudd as PM put into effect the so-called "more compassionate approach to asylum seekers" formulated by Gillard and the rest of the Left. Nauru was closed down, asylum seekers were processed on the mainland, welfare handouts reinstituted and, as a result the whole people smuggler industry was cranked up again. It was like waving a red flag to a bull. Australia was open for business again and within a year or two many more boats arrived than during the entire 9/11 terrorism era.
At first the neophyte Immigration minister Chris Bowen manufactured excuses to try and explain away the sudden upsurge in boat arrivals. It was all due to the Sri Lankan war and the Tamil Tigers. The public and media treated this BS with the contempt it deserved. Pretty soon it was on for young and old. They started flooding in from Afghanistan and other muslim countries again, there were even boatloads arriving from Vietnam - now a prosperous country which hasn't seen war for 35 years.
During all of this tragedy, the government has been caught badly flat footed. They've cobbled together a motley range of makeshift arrangements to try and accommodate the invasion without success. The detention centres are now overflowing with no end in sight. The federal opposition has been negotiating with Nauru with a view to having the successful Pacific Solution reinstituted but Gillard won't have a bar of it. It was Howard's idea, you see, and Gillard can't swallow her pride and admit that she and Rudd got it wrong and Howard was right.
The most spectacular failing of the Gillard government's ramshackle asylum seeker policy was the disastrous "Malaysia solution". The word "solution" was coined by the media. In reality it wasn't a solution at all and it was quickly struck down by the High Court. The government wants to put in a legislative response which will nullify the High Court ruling but the Left and The Greens have arced up and Gillard has been forced to try and get Tony Abbott and the opposition onside to get it through parliament. Abbott has said that Malaysia is out - refugees are routinely whipped and tortured and conditions in their refugee camps are appalling. He has repeatedly offered Nauru and the reinstitution of temporary protection visas as the solution, but Gillard still won't comply so the shambles continues.
Sooner or later the government will have to get real and realise that their "compassionate approach" to asylum seekers has been a total failure. Increasingly though, that looks like a forlorn hope. Like everything else in this country that has been destroyed by Labor and The Greens it just has to stay shattered and in disrepair until the temporary aberration of Labor/Greens/independent government is over and Tony Abbott sends in the cleanup crew to get this country back on track again.
That can't happen soon enough.
