As someone who was Minister for Immigration for nearly three years and who had to provide almost daily commentary on one of the most controversial areas of public policy in Australia, you’d think I’d welcome the chance as a backbencher to talk about any other issue that takes my fancy. And you’d be right. But the current surge of asylum-seekers calls me back to the fray.

As even this magazine has recognised, I spent a lot time as the minister responsible arguing for a robust approach to border protection. There is nothing humane about a system which tells people their best chance of a new life in Australia is to risk their lives to get here. Simply put, too many people are drowning at sea.

Australia has a generous refugee resettlement program. We accept more refugees per head of population than any other country in the world. But the program is skewed towards people from just a few countries by boat arrivals. And there are people in desperate circumstances missing out because they could never afford to pay a people-smuggler.

Having argued before the Cabinet, Caucus and National Conference for a robust approach, the Labor party has a good and strong policy. It is now only the Greens who unrealistically refuse to accept that it is fairer and safer to have a more orderly refugee program than having people-smugglers determine the priority order of those to be resettled in Australia.

But while the ALP and LNP agree on the objective of stopping boat arrivals and resettling people directly out of refugee camps, the war of words between the parties continues and the opposition continues to complain that the government has not adopted tough enough polices, while blocking an approach they say is too tough.

If only Australia could convince another country in our region to assist. If only we could find a country in our region that might take people who arrive in Australia on a semi-permanent basis to provide a real disincentive to undertake the boat journey to Australia. We might then stand a chance of breaking this pernicious trade. But wait. There is such a country: it’s called Malaysia.

Soon after becoming Minister for Immigration in 2010, I convened a meeting of the government’s experts on asylum and smuggling issues: department heads, former ambassadors, national defence experts. ‘I’m a new minister,’ I told them ‘It’s a blank canvas. Tell me what will work and I will pursue it. Don’t be afraid to recommend things that have previously been rejected, because I will pursue whatever will work, including Nauru and TPVs, if that is your advice.’

The advice was unanimous. Nauru won’t work by itself, because smugglers and asylum-seekers have worked out that it is a staging post, a transit lounge on the way to resettlement in Australia. TPVs won’t work because people don’t mind waiting three years for a permanent visa when they know that the chances of a permanent visa at the end of those three years are very high. The advice was also unanimous on ‘turning back the boats’. Sure, it would be very effective, but it puts at risk the lives of Australian naval personnel. Moreover, in one fell swoop, it would wreck the important bilateral relationship with Indonesia.

The advice was to pursue a ‘virtual’ turn-back policy, by getting a country in our region like Indonesia, Malaysia or Pakistan to accept the return of asylum-seekers by plane in exchange for resettling a higher number of refugees who were being accommodated in that country. This would be an extremely effective deterrent, a much more powerful message than some sort of temporary accommodation in Nauru before the inevitable resettlement in Australia.

There was a big ‘but’. The chances of getting a country to agree to such an arrangement were less than one per cent. It would be very hard to get a country to agree to resettle people who come to Australia by boat for an indefinite period of time. These countries have their own problems, I was told, and won’t be too keen to help us with ours. But given the strength of the advice, we set out to make it so. Months of intensive discussion, diplomacy and negotiation with Malaysia followed, necessarily in secret. Malaysia, as a responsible regional player, wanted to help, and after much detailed discussion an agreement was struck.

Just as returning 1,000 people without valid claims to Sri Lanka last year reduced the flow of arrivals from that country to a trickle, so too would returning 800 people to Malaysia make a huge difference. In setting the right policy here, it is not so much the numbers that are important but the effectiveness of the policy.

The rest is history. The High Court redefined the common understanding of the law in such a way as to make illegal any offshore processing without legislation. The Opposition decided that they would oppose the Malaysian agreement as a matter of high principle because asylum-seekers should not be ‘dumped’ in countries that are not signatories to the refugee convention. Instead of safely moving people to a country that has agreed to take them, the Liberal party prefers a policy of unsafely transferring people to a country that does not agree. If the conservatives take office in September, they will get the same advice that a new minister did three years ago. They may regret the day they opposed a solution that would actually work.

The post Across the aisle appeared first on The Spectator.