No asylum seeker who arrives in Australia by boat will be allowed to settle in the country, PM says

All asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat will be sent to Papua New Guinea for processing and resettlement and none will be allowed to stay in the country, the prime minister has announced, as he sent out a draconian pre-election message that Australia’s borders are closed to refugees.

In what he said was “a clear and undiluted message to every people smuggler in the world that your business model is basically undermined”, Kevin Rudd said the new rules would apply initially for one year and there was no limit on the numbers of asylum seekers PNG would take.

In return, the government announced new aid to PNG for hospitals and universities and said it would pay unspecified “resettlement costs” for the refugees as well as bearing the costs of the expansion and upgrade of the Manus Island processing centre. Rudd said only that the package would “not be inexpensive” but no cost details were immediately available.

Refugee advocates said the substandard conditions in PNG’s Manus Island detention centre, the very high crime rates in the country and “daily pervasive human rights abuses” were evidence the new arrangements contravened Australia’s basic obligations to help refugees who come here.

The Greens leader, Christine Milne, said it was a “day of shame for Australia” and accused Rudd of “lurching so far to the right that he has leapfrogged Tony Abbott in terms of cruelty”.

Milne said it was “appalling” that Australia would “pay our most impoverished neighbour” so it could “dump” people there without any chance of safety or work or a decent life.

The Coalition leader, Tony Abbott, said the crackdown was “a promising development in offshore processing” which he welcomed, but said Australians should not trust Labor to stop the boats or implement the crackdown.

Under the new agreement between Australia and PNG, asylum seekers who arrive from Friday will have health checks and immunisations on Christmas Island and then, within weeks, will be transferred to Manus Island and “other centres” in PNG as yet unspecified.

Geographical location of Manus Island

The immigration minister, Tony Burke, who recently moved women and children off Manus Island because of substandard conditions, said families would not be sent to the centre until it was upgraded. PNG politicians suggested Friday its capacity would increase from 600 to 3,000.

Human rights lawyers are foreshadowing a legal challenge against the dramatic move, but the attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, said he was certain it was entirely in accordance with Australia’s domestic and international law obligations. He said PNG had now “withdrawn” the reservations it had lodged with the UN to the refugee convention.

Rudd said there was no cap or limit on the number of asylum seekers PNG had agreed to take, but he expected over time as people smugglers “got the message” the rate of arrivals would slow.

Rudd also announced a new international conference of immigration transit countries and said, as boat arrivals slowed, Labor would consider increasing the humanitarian intake from 20,000 to 27,000.

Papua New Guinea’s prime minister, Peter O'Neill, was with Rudd at the Brisbane announcement and was later briefing Abbott and the Coalition foreign affairs spokeswoman, Julie Bishop.

There are now just 200 asylum seekers in the detention centre on swampy, tropical Manus Island in northern PNG, which was established in 2001 as part of former prime minister John Howard’s “Pacific Solution”. It was closed in 2004 when there were no more detainees and reopened in 2012 when the Gillard government resumed offshore processing.

Conditions on the remote island have been controversial, with the UN high commissioner for refugees recently finding that, while improving, they were still below required international standards.

"Cramped living quarters were observed, while asylum seekers reported issues with the heat, privacy, hygiene and access to medical services,” the UNHCR found.

Guardian Australia recently reported that the joint Australia-Papua New Guinea committee set up to oversee processing on the island had never met.

Also contributing to hopes that the flow of asylum seekers will slow is news that the Indonesian government has agreed to Rudd’s request to make it harder for Iranians to enter the country, in a move that could slow the passage of asylum seekers planning to board boats bound for Australia.

The new directive from the Indonesian justice minister, Amir Syamsuddin, to deny Iranians the right to buy temporary visas upon arrival, addresses an issue raised by Rudd in recent talks with the Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

The asylum crackdown is the third and final piece of policy repositioning Rudd wanted to complete before calling an election and comes after he brought forward the end of the fixed carbon price and dubbed himself the carbon tax “terminator”.

Rudd has also proposed sweeping changes to the rules governing the election of Labor leaders, in order to rebut Coalition claims that the “faceless” men could again dump him if Labor was voted back in. Those rules are expected to be endorsed at a special caucus meeting in the Sydney suburb of Balmain on Monday. Balmain and the central Queensland town of Barcaldine are claimed as the “birthplaces” of the ALP.

With pre-selections in all but a few very safe Liberal seats completed by Sunday and the opinion polls showing Labor’s electoral resurgence is holding, the way is now clear for Rudd to call an election as early as next week.

The changes announced on Friday were the latest in a series of asylum policy switches by the ALP.

When he was dumped as Labor leader in June 2010, Rudd appealed to his party not to “lurch to the right” on asylum policy.

Two weeks later, in the lead-up to the last federal election in 2010, Julia Gillard tore up Rudd’s policy and proposed the “Timor Solution”, proposing Timor Leste as the site for an offshore processing centre. That idea was rejected by the Timorese government.

After the election, Gillard proposed an exchange of asylum seekers for processed refugees from Malaysia, but that plan was struck down by the high court and Labor was unable to get parliament to support the legislation necessary to validate it. Gillard then convened an expert panel and, on its recommendation, shifted policy again to resume offshore processing on Manus Island and Nauru – as had long been advocated by the Coalition.

None of the policy lurches succeeded in stemming the flow of asylum seekers arriving by boat. More than 15,600 have arrived so far this year, filling detention facilities and leaving almost 17,000 people living in the community, in poverty, with no work rights and no idea when their claims are going to be heard.

A dramatic shift in asylum policy in 2001 helped Howard turn around poor polling and win the November federal election, after he refused permission for the MV Tampa to enter Australian waters with its cargo of rescued asylum seekers.