The Malaysian Solution remains gridlocked in the High Court, but Gillard has had a win in the asylum seeker debate with Papua New Guinea agreeing to a detention centre to be re-opened on Manus Island.

A processing centre existed on Manus Island under Howard’s Pacific Solution but closed in 2003. PNG’s new Prime Minister Peter O’Neill — who was only voted PM last week — mainly agreed to the deal due to economic contributions and aid commitments from Australia to PNG in return for the centre.

The Manus Island centre would take some heat of the Malaysian plan — where 800 boat arrivals in Australia are ‘swapped’ with 4000 declared refugees from Malaysia — currently being challenged in the High Court, as it offers a safer, Australian-run alternative to send asylum seekers. As David Marr and Phillip Coorey reported in the Sydney Morning Herald earlier this week:

“Children, for example, could be sent there to what would be an Australian-monitored facility instead of back to Malaysia, which has a poor record in human rights.”

Kirsty Needham in The Age agrees that the Manus Island plan helps the human rights battle the Gillard government is currently embroiled in:

“Because the PNG centre would be Australian-run, it is unlikely to come up against the same human rights objections as the Malaysia swap, which involves sending unaccompanied children to a country with a chequered history on refugees. However, a reopened Manus Island is unlikely to gain support from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.”

The news of a PNG centre comes as another boat full of asylum seekers arrived at Christmas Island, the third since the Malaysia deal was signed. Needham describes the scene:

“A large wooden boat crowded with 100 asylum seekers, legs hanging off its bow and crammed under a stretched tarpaulin, chugged past the Bosun pub and belched diesel into Flying Fish Cove as people smugglers again ignored the federal government’s Malaysia threat.

A toddler was carried onto the jetty with a small boy and a teenager, among a family group of 10 including three women, one in a burqa.”

A Comcare report examined by Lateline last night gave a scathing rundown of detention centres in Australia:

The report identifies five major failures by the Department of Immigration across the detention centre network:

  • There is no risk management process, despite the highly volatile environment
  • There is no plan to alter staffing levels to deal with dramatic fluctuations in detainee numbers
  • Staff are not trained to the point where they are confident and competent in their jobs
  • There is no effective written plan to deal with critical incidents like riots and suicide attempts
  • And no steps are taken to manage detainees’ religious and cultural needs, detainees are roomed together even when there’s a history of extreme violence between their ethnic groups in their home countries.

We need to support the Malaysian Solution as it’s the best way to discourage people smugglers, writes John Stuyfbergen in The National Times:

“To do nothing risks families and children perishing at sea in substandard and leaky boats. And if we think that present boat arrivals at Christmas Island can be managed because it’s just a case of the odd people smuggler, we should think again.

If it isn’t the case yet, it won’t be long before organised crime will consider people smuggling to Australia as an excellent return on their minimal investment. At the level of money they charge each refugee, compassion does not seem to play a role. Most likely a boat disaster would be only “collateral damage”.

There is a possible long-term approach to achieve a regional solution, but the only immediate solution is the Malaysia deal — sending asylum seekers back to the end of the queue in Malaysia under strict, humanitarian and transparent conditions.”

The first group of 4000 refugees from Malaysia flew in to Melbourne last night, 13 people from the Chin minority in Burma. They “arrived bearing Australian flags and woolly hats for the lingering winter chill,” report Rowan Callick and Pia Akerman and Paige Taylor in The Australian. “Kham Kap Thang Taithoul and his young family said they were glad to leave their ‘very scary’ Malaysian experience behind, as the legal battle continued about whether Malaysia was fit to host asylum-seekers. ‘It’s very difficult to stay in Malaysia,’ Mr Taithoul said through an interpreter. ‘It was a very scary country because always they can arrest us there.'”