http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HCA/2011/32.html

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Plaintiff M70/2011 v Minister for Immigration and Citizenship; Plaintiff M106 of 2011 v Minister for Immigration and Citizenship [2011] HCA 32 (31 August 2011)

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ORDER(s)

Matter No M70/2011

Declare that the declaration made by the "Instrument of Declaration of Malaysia as a Declared Country under subsection 198A(3) of the Migration Act 1958" dated 25 July 2011 was made without power and is invalid.
The first defendant, whether by his officers or otherwise howsoever, is restrained from taking the plaintiff from Australia to Malaysia.
The defendants pay the plaintiff's costs of the proceedings to date before Hayne J and the Full Court.

Matter No M106/2011

Declare that the declaration made by the "Instrument of Declaration of Malaysia as a Declared Country under subsection 198A(3) of the Migration Act 1958" dated 25 July 2011 was made without power and is invalid.
The first defendant, whether by his officers or otherwise howsoever, is restrained from taking the plaintiff from Australia to Malaysia.
The first defendant, whether by his officers or otherwise howsoever, is restrained from taking the plaintiff from Australia without there being a consent in writing of the Minister given under s 6A(1) of the Immigration (Guardianship of Children) Act 1946 (Cth).
The defendants pay the plaintiff's costs of the proceedings to date before Hayne J and the Full Court.

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MIGRATION ACT 1958 - SECT 198A
Offshore entry person may be taken to a declared country

(1) An officer may take an offshore entry person from Australia to a country in respect of which a declaration is in force under subsection (3).

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(3) The Minister may:

(a) declare in writing that a specified country:

(i) provides access, for persons seeking asylum, to effective procedures for assessing their need for protection; and

(ii) provides protection for persons seeking asylum, pending determination of their refugee status; and

(iii) provides protection to persons who are given refugee status, pending their voluntary repatriation to their country of origin or resettlement in another country; and

(iv) meets relevant human rights standards in providing that protection;

I don’t want to disagree with Divergence, but I’m a bit more optimistic.

I disagree with the estimate of ‘arable’ land at 6%. Soils in the American Southwest are comparable to much of Australia: wretched desert when dry, surprisingly productive when irrigated. That’s not impossible here; the infrastructure which supplies water to Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego and Los Angeles can be replicated here; we haven’t really begun to use our capacity to produce food. The Top End is pretty wet. Not that we’d want to replicate Southern California in outback Queensland and the Kimberly, but it’s just not true that our dry continent is anywhere near full ... if we’re creative.

You’re right, unemployment is uncomfortable at the moment ... but it’s still bloody good by comparison with our trading partners. Agribusiness is desperate for workers; it’s limiting our agricultural productivity. We’re going to be bringing in skilled workers from all over Europe and the USA for to build planned resource extraction infrastructure, and they’ll drive demand for services. The infrastructure they’ll require (homes, shops, roads, etc.) had BETTER not be built by government; private investment is available to meet anticipated demand, provided government doesn’t get in the way.

Have to disagree with King Hazza. Islamist extremists don’t get here via people-smugglers; why bother, when you can get here legally? We have a few areas where middle-eastern migrants haven’t yet integrated very well, but not many. I don’t see politics or religion as particularly relevant to Australia’s disquiet over illegal immigration.

Rather, I suspect that our collective foresight predicts big trouble ahead if we prove unable to deal with illegal arrivals. Those who arrive by plane have passports and visas, and sending them home if they overstay or misbehave is easy as. The real problem is that, if you apply for asylum overseas through proper channels, your chances of legal migration are very, very low. Whereas if you arrive by boat, the odds are 85%+ you’ll get citizenship for yourself and your rellies. Now THAT’s perverse, and fair-minded people are justifiably concerned.

Donkeygod, you have misread my post;

Just because people don't come here with the explicit motive to conduct an attack- doesn't mean they're not extremists who would pose a potential danger when their religious sensibilities are inevitably offended by this 'immoral' secular society they wanted to move into.
And that includes people who come as refugees.

Donkeygod,

The idea of turning rivers inland and the like to make the interior of Australia green and fertile is a myth. See

http://www.wentworthgroup.org/docs/Can_We_Myth_Proof_Australia.pdf

Even if you could deal with the problems of low soil fertility identified in those CSIRO maps I linked to, where would you get the water? Where would you get the enormous energy required to pump it inland? How would you deal with the ferocious evaporation rates? How would you store the water in the large parts of the country that are very flat and unsuitable for dam building? If it is so easy to make deserts fertile, why haven't they done it with the Sahara or the deserts in western China? Supplying nutrients is also likely to be a serious issue in the future. See the following graph for trends in the world market price of phosphate, an absolutely irreplaceable nutrient for plant growth which is particularly scarce in Australian soils

http://www.mongabay.com/images/commodities/charts/phosphate_rock.html

Only about 220,000 people work in mining. Most migrants end up in the capital cities, where they are employed to build houses and provide people services for more and more people - a great Ponzi scheme while it lasts. The 2006 Productivity Commission report modelled the effects of a doubling of skilled migration, the best case for population growth, as the migrants have already been raised, educated, and trained at someone else's expense. They found a net per capita economic benefit of less than $400 per person, mostly distributed to the owners of capital and the migrants themselves. They didn't attempt to include negative effects from crowding, overstretched infrastructure and public services, loss of amenity and open space, etc.

Finally, if people listen to me and I am wrong, we take an economic hit, but we can always increase the population later. If they listen to you and you are wrong, it means disaster, possibly even a full on societal collapse.