Many of them perished after they were denied asylum and the convention was a response to their tragic fate. It sought to avoid a repeat of that fate. Today, there are estimated to be more than 15 million refugees worldwide. Most of them live in makeshift camps in countries neighbouring their homelands, the first places to which they have fled. Typically these host countries - places such as Pakistan, Kenya, Chad and Bangladesh - are too poor to look after the refugees and so the United Nations steps in. These countries are usually not signatories to the convention and have no obligation to grant asylum to the refugees on their soil.

The makeshift camps are the location of the so-called "queue" of refugees, which boat people are said to have jumped. Of course, there is no queue at all in these camps; just a desperate half-existence, year in, year out, hoping that your lucky number comes up one day. Contrary to public perception, Australia has no legal obligation to these people in the so-called queue. The convention does not oblige us to take any of them, neither does any other legal undertaking. On the contrary, what the convention obliges us to do is take people who reach our shores and seek asylum. This is fundamentally why the High Court struck down the Malaysia solution, because sending people to Malaysia without assessing whether they were refugees breached that legal obligation. Public policy in Australia seems to have reversed the legal position. The major parties and public opinion seem to say that we should refuse refuge to those who reach our shores and seek asylum because that denies refuge to those in the so-called queue. That is, we should abrogate an obligation which is legally binding on us so that we can comply with an imagined obligation by which we are not, in fact, bound. There are only two ways out. The first is to live up to our legal obligation and offer asylum to refugees who reach our shores, as the convention requires us to do. This requires a rejection of two decades of largely bipartisan policy aimed at avoiding those obligations. It no longer seems an option. Neither does it seem any longer to be an option to continue the legal farce of pretending to comply with the convention. The second way out is to bring our legal obligations into line with public opinion and the real policies of both major political parties.

That is, withdraw from the convention and end the increasingly foolish - and we now discover futile - attempts at avoiding our obligations while pretending to comply with them. This would result in completing what John Howard started with the Tampa, continued through the Pacific Solution and what Labor has tried unsuccessfully to implement with its Malaysia solution. This course will no doubt be very unpopular in some quarters and for good reason. It would signal to all that we, one of the richest countries in the world with enviable space and resources to spare, did not want to share with the bedraggled and desperate few who, by good fortune, wash up on our shores. But this is only to tell the truth about who and what we are as a people. Furthermore, with the millions of dollars saved through abandonment of the attempts to comply with the convention, we could offer to settle increased numbers of refugees from the camps. Indeed, this would be a necessary corollary of the withdrawal from the convention. It is for the sake of the people in the camps that we seek to turn away those who arrive on our shores. Those in the so-called queue would therefore have to be the beneficiaries of this change in policy.

Labor has tried everything else. It cannot now do worse than to try this. Loading Michael Pearce, SC, is Melbourne lawyer and former president of Liberty Victoria. Follow the National Times on Twitter: @NationalTimesAU