The problem with Boris’s Rwanda solution

Is the Prime Minister’s plan to divert some asylum seekers to Rwanda racist? Is it inhumane? Is it a dead cat to distract from his fixed-penalty notice for breaching Covid rules? These are the questions fixating the political-media-activist class today and while they are not necessarily unimportant, they neglect a question that might be of more immediate concern to the average voter concerned about border integrity and abuse of the asylum system. Namely, will the Prime Minister’s plan work?

To answer this, we must acknowledge its provenance in Australia’s policy of offshore processing, detention and turn backs, introduced in 2001 as John Howard’s Pacific Solution and reintroduced by Tony Abbott in 2013 as Operation Sovereign Borders. Illegal boat arrivals are a hot-button issue in Australian politics and even the Labor party, while critical of Coalition governments along similar lines to those we are seeing today, have adopted variations of the policy when they have been in power.