Pacific Solution

The Pacific Solution is the name given to the Australian government policy of transporting asylum seekers to detention centres on island nations in the Pacific Ocean, rather than allowing them to land on the Australian mainland. Implemented during 2001–2007, it had bipartisan support from the Liberal-National government and Labor opposition at the time.

The Pacific Solution consisted of three central strategies:

A number of pieces of legislation enabled this policy. The policy was developed by the Howard government in response to the Tampa affair in August 2001, and was implemented by then Australian Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock on 28 September before the 2001 federal election of 24 November.

The policy was largely dismantled in 2008 by the Rudd government following the election of the Australian Labor Party; Chris Evans, the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship described it as "a cynical, costly and ultimately unsuccessful exercise". Following the abolition of the policy, over the period from 2008-2013, non-government sources estimate that around 1100 people perished at sea (compared with an estimated 400-760 people under the Coalition policy). (The Australian Government has not released its own figures of asylum seeker drownings in the region either before or after the policy.) A further 51,000 people seeking asylum attempted to reach Australia during the same period.

In August 2012, the succeeding Gillard Labor government introduced a similar policy, reopening Nauru detention centre and Manus Island detention centre for offshore processing, and on 19 July 2013, newly returned Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced, "asylum seekers who come here by boat without a visa will never be settled in Australia", striking a Regional Resettlement Arrangement between Australia and Papua New Guinea, to divert all "unauthorised maritime arrivals" to mandatory detention on Manus Island with no possibility of attaining Australian residency.

...
Wikipedia