One of the challenges for the first term of a new Labor Government will be to bring back a bipartisan and humanitarian approach to Australia's dealings with some of the most vulnerable people in the world — refugees and asylum seekers. The task will extend to negotiating new relationships with the Pacific countries contracted to house Australia's asylum seekers and refugees in recent years, in particular the impoverished nation of Nauru.
As a positive first step, the new Rudd Government has announced it will end the controversial and expensive Pacific Solution policy and close the processing centres in Nauru and PNG. After initially supporting the policy's introduction in the heat of an intense election campaign in 2001, the ALP changed its position in early 2002 and has since opposed the processing of Australia's asylum seekers in Pacific countries.
Under the so called Pacific Solution Australia's asylum seekers were warehoused indefinitely in declared Pacific countries, at great expense to Australian taxpayers. Even those assessed to be refugees were not, we were told, Australia's responsibility and other countries were sought for their resettlement.
The Pacific Solution was a game of smoke and mirrors and a solution only for setting up an election win for a government behind in the polls and for distracting from the Howard Government's inability to manage the increasing numbers of asylum seekers arriving under its watch. For the Howard Government, the messy problem of boat arrivals was more easily managed in other countries, out of the Australian public's view.
But while abolishing the Pacific Solution is undoubtedly a good policy decision for Australia, the citizens of Nauru are now facing an uncertain future with the likely associated loss of aid and income.
Over recent years I have made many visits to Nauru to spend time with asylum seekers and refugees. I have also become acutely aware of the different context in which this policy is viewed in a country whose most pressing need, unlike Australia's, is to feed its own people. With that in mind it might be easier for Australians to empathise with the desperate choice Nauru made when agreeing to host the camps.
When members of the current Nauruan Government came to power in 2004 they made an uncomfortable decision to continue the policy they had inherited from the previous Rene Harris led Government. A dependency had been created and the benefits to a poor