The 'Malaysia solution': has its time now come?

So, if Malaysia is for them not a fit place for the refugees, neither is Australia. Why then do the Greens urge open, unrestricted entry here to all comers and claimants?  On what basis can they do so?

A workable set of arrangements has been negotiated by Australia with the Malaysian government.

These arrangements are not perfect, neither is Malaysia. Nor are we.

But those arrangements have been agreed upon. They are workable.

So why resist implementing them?

Tony Abbott’s reasons and strategy are clear. They are rational if hardly attractive.

On immigration, as on all other matters, he wants, by a chosen strategy of finely targeted obstructionism to all government initiatives (in other words, of “maximum possible nay-saying and mischief-making”), to make the country ungovernable.

That is half of his strategy. The other half is then to spend the rest of his time sneering and jeering that the government is demonstrably hopeless, that it simply cannot govern.

Whose doing is that? Abbott is on a sure winner.

But at least his strategy makes sense for him.

Less fathomable are the Greens and the other “human rights purists” who will not have a bar of the “Malaysia solution” because of Malaysia’s defects and shortcomings.

Having spent a scholarly life, over half a century, studying Malaysian society, culture and politics — and many years living there — I know those shortcomings far better than most.