Inside the Coalition, there is a strong expectation that the government will shortly unveil a third country resettlement deal to try and fix Australia’s diabolical problem of 2,000 people languishing indefinitely in immigration detention centres.



There have been hints about this for the past few months.

A month and a half ago the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, opened the door to resettling refugees detained on Nauru in New Zealand.

That particular door wasn’t open very long. The hint of a shift in policy appeared in an interview Dutton did with the al-Jazeera network that hit the public domain on 15 September.

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By that evening, troubled by an unauthorised message arrival (the interview was broadcast earlier than anticipated) Dutton closed the door. Australia’s regional processing relationship with Nauru would continue for “decades” he said by way of clarification.

There was a another batch of significant talk when Dutton and Malcolm Turnbull went to the United Nations, and said Australia would take refugees from camps in Costa Rica. Perhaps the third country wasn’t New Zealand but the United States. Perhaps it was both.

The latest batch of internal speculation has been triggered by the government on Sunday sounding the political trumpets before revealing plans to introduce new legislation to ban asylum seekers who arrive by boat from ever being allowed into Australia.

While confirming nothing, Turnbull and Dutton have certainly done nothing definitive over the past 24 hours to hose down speculation the new batch of ritualised punishment for unauthorised arrivals is, somehow, a necessary prerequisite to third-country resettlement.

Obviously if there is some prospect of ending the unconscionable arbitrary detention of thousands of people who have committed absolutely no crime, then this would be a welcome development, a means to an end, with the end goal being the clearing of the wretched offshore camps.

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If this is the actual objective, in any rational universe, the government would engage the ALP, and work constructively to get it done.

But this is asylum politics, so the prospect of anyone inhabiting a rational universe is slim.

And so we’ve seen the same old rubbish.

The government has decided to convert what could be a prelude to trying to do something minutely humane for asylum seekers into an operatic political smash-up on Labor’s weakness on border protection.

Why? Well who knows.

A couple of possibilities: sounding manly on the boats does throw a bone to the Hansonites, which is moderately helpful, when the Hansonites are fully intent on coming after your base.

Pauline Hanson declared on morning television on Monday refugees weren’t welcome in Australia. The prime minister, travelling in South Australia, chose not to disavow Hanson’s statement. “I am not going to run a commentary on others,” Turnbull said.

Apart from a crude bit of political signalling to your fractured base, perhaps it’s just a simple political diversion: a two-card trick.

Just think about it like this: if the government is going to try to shift some people out of indefinite detention, this is obviously a significant change of pace in the story the government likes to tell about border protection, particularly in a febrile environment where parliamentarians think it’s a political plus to declare refugees are not welcome in this country.

Let’s cut to the chase. If this is about to happen, it will be the first moderately humane thing the government has done in this wretched policy space. The mild outbreak of humanity could confuse some of the government’s cheerleaders and amplifiers, who apparently think mercy should never apply to people who seek asylum by turning up in a boat.

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Given the government might be about to present some people with an opportunity to get out of the limbo we’ve put them in because of our deranged domestic political debate, perhaps it’s best from their perspective if we don’t look too closely at the Coalition making preparations to be “soft” on border protection – or God forbid, frame the news coverage from that perspective.

Best we look at Labor being “soft” on border protection. And the first run has worked precisely to script, the party’s left faction out in horror at the latest policy atrocity, the Labor leader Bill Shorten trying to sound like he’s saying no while leaving himself room to say yes.



Could they be that cynical?

You bet they could be that cynical.

Just ask those poor souls in detention on Nauru.