What is the policy objective of the Howard government in extending the Pacific Solution to all asylum seekers arriving on Australian territory by boat? After the first wave of ‘boatpeople’ from Afghanistan and Iraq ceased, the Australian government renewed the contracts of the immigration processing centres on Nauru and Manus Island, and proceeded to construct a new centre on Christmas Island. The boats stopped coming in part because there was no longer a ready market for the people smugglers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in part because the Indonesian government had put in place measures funded by the Australian government to stop asylum seekers making secondary movements from Indonesia to Australia. The justification for the long term detention of unvisaed asylum seekers on the Australian mainland and in the Pacific centres was the need to deter people from engaging people smugglers in their desire to seek a migration outcome by means of secondary movement once they had fled their country of persecution. The Australian government seems to have taken the arrival of one boatload of Papuans in direct flight from Papua as the trigger for extending the Pacific solution to all boat arrivals. Though no longer Minister for Immigration, Phillip Ruddock sits on the Cabinet’s National Security Committee and speaks for the portfolio whenever the minister, ,Amanda Vanstone, is indisposed. It fell to Ruddock to defend the proposed extension of the Pacific solution in the wake of criticism by the UNHCR. Ruddock claims that in its implementation of the Pacific Solution Mark 2, the Australian government “will meet its international refugee protection obligations.” The UNHCR Geneva has however said that the Australian policy “would be an unfortunate precedent, being for the first time, to our knowledge, that a country with a fully functioning and credible asylum system, in the absence of anything approximating a mass influx, decides to transfer elsewhere the responsibility to handle claims made actually on the territory of the state.” When Minister for Immigration, Ruddock often emphasised that the international system was not working efficiently, with first world countries spending inordinate amounts of money on border protection and next to nothing on supporting UNHCR and host governments in the neediest refugee camps. He thought that regional holding and processing centres could help streamline the management of national border issues, freeing funds for channelling to the neediest refugees. Ruddock seemed to assume that the UNHCR did not have