HIS week marked two anniversaries: a year since Julia Gillard announced her East Timor solution and two months since she announced her Malaysia solution.
Neither arrangement has come to pass but they are a clear admission that it has been the government's policies that caused the surge in boat arrivals.
Even Robert Manne has acknowledged that the inevitable consequence of Labor's decision to soften border protection policies was that it would lead to people once again coming on boats, and Labor should have prepared for that outcome.
The only way to break the people-smugglers' business model is to change Labor's polices. Immigration Minister Chris Bowen seems to understand this. He has put forward an arrangement to remove the certainty of a visa for those who come by boat and supplemented this with third-country offshore processing.
This is what the Coalition implemented with the Pacific Solution, but Labor refuses to admit this because it would have to acknowledge its hypocrisy. Worse, it is turning a blind eye to the barbarous realities of its policies.
In 2006, Bowen chastised the Howard government for sending people to Nauru, saying: "The biggest problem is that even if an asylum-seeker . . . has their application for refugee status accepted, there is no guarantee of a visa to settle in Australia."
He now says the opposite about Nauru, but he was right the first time. Just 43 per cent of those who went through the Pacific Solution ended up in Australia.
In 2006, he said: "We say that asylum-seekers should be treated the same regardless of how they land. We say they should be dealt with fairly, swiftly and on Australian soil." Now he says they should be sent to Malaysia to be processed, where people at the front of the queue will wait for at least four to five years, in conditions far worse than any Australian-run detention centre.
Yet the maximum time any detainee spent on Nauru was five years, and that person failed an ASIO security clearance.
In 2006 he said children should "have access to resources for a much better chance at life. What future are we delivering to these children?" Yet children sent to Malaysia will have no access to public schools and no access to free health care. They would have both in Nauru under the Coalition's policies.
No wonder asylum-seeker advocate Marion Le and former human rights commissioner Sev Ozdowski have acknowledged the Coalition's policies now represent the more humane option.
I have seen the conditions in which refugee and asylum-seeker children live with their families in Malaysia. Bowen should too. I visited the makeshift schools run by refugee volunteer teachers who receive 10 days' training, crammed into small rooms in run-down buildings.
I visited the one health clinic funded by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Kuala Lumpur. It services 94,000 refugees and asylum-seekers. I listened to the stories of the fear of these refugees in their homes, where raids and arrest are a way of life.
Even with a UNHCR card, refugees recounted numerous stories of being arrested and it can take between two weeks and two months to have them released.
What goes on in those prisons and detention centres is a world away from what occurs in detention in Australia or Nauru. I inspected one of the detention centres near the airport. It holds more than 100 women and children, including refugees in a spartan concrete building, behind a 3m high, three-tier coils of razor wire and a 9000-volt electric fence. In the male section, there was a 16-year-old unaccompanied boy.
The detainees are held in these buildings for 22 hours a day. The other two hours are spent in the small compound surrounding the building. There are no facilities for children, not even a sand pit.
Refugees in Malaysia live a life of complete vulnerability.
Labor is deluding itself if it thinks that a few words in an agreement, even from the UNHCR, will protect asylum-seekers in Malaysia.
The government cannot wash its hands of these issues by increasing our intake of refugees from Malaysia. It could do this anyway without the additional $216 million cost to taxpayers and without sending anyone to Malaysia. The fact it is willing to do it only when there is a people trade on the table exposes an ugliness that Labor refuses to admit.
The Coalition has proven, more humane and more cost-effective policies to clean up the mess Labor has created on border protection, which is costing Australian taxpayers more than $1 billion a year, compared with less than $100m when the Coalition left office.
Regardless of the ultimate success of Labor's policy announcements, the legacy of its failures will cost us all for many years to come, particularly those Labor will send to Malaysia.
Scott Morrison is the opposition spokesman for immigration.
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