The high court told us what law we had broken. It is illegal to expel any person from our shores without due process of the law and under our constitution we cannot make that law anything we deem it to be.

Under the constitution anyone has the legal right to appeal to the first court of the land, that is what law it broke.

Marylin,

Obviously you read a different judgement. There is no constitutional prohibition, neither was there any direct criticism of off shore processing. The judgement was directly aimed at the Malaysian solution and the lack of legal guarantees.

I understand that with the Malaysian solution we ship 1200 boat people to Malaysia and in return accept 5000 refugees held in Malaysia. At the rate the boats are coming we will receive an additional 5000 refugees vetted by Malaysian officials every 2 or 3 weeks. I would call this a ridiculous solution. Rudd dismantled the Pacific solution which was working fine BIG STUPID MISTAKE. The Malaysian solution looks equally as stupid.

JudyMacD,

I like your idea, but can't readily think of a country which might be interested and suitable - one not already bursting at the seams with overpopulation, or not suffering the sorts of tribal or sectarian strife which has created all these refugees? Some countries could certainly do with the development this sort of arrangement might afford - with the right level of investment - like PNG, West Papua (with Indonesian and local approval) or East Timor, and maybe parts of Africa. A hard sell, but the idea has merit.

The only answer I can see for actually stopping the boats (and embarking on organised refugee placement) is to take all boat arrivals back to where they came from immediately, no questions asked, and to take an equal number of screened genuine refugees from the same country by return flight - preferably including an equal or greater number of non-Muslims as Muslims - to maintain a reasonable balance in our own community - and as ethnically mixed as possible. (As I don't think we need more ethnic enclaves, and would prefer to maximise potentials for integration.) Getting sent straight back would soon get the message out.

Some will argue my suggestion is 'heartless', but really I think those who don't have the means to pay for boat passage should have an equal chance - and those 'returnees' can just get in line like everyone else. We can then also take additional numbers, as need and accommodations enable - by way of an organised immigration program, and not with a gun to our heads.

To those who say 'returning' these boat people would be illegal, I would answer that they left their departure point without proper papers or clearance, and therefore illegally, and we are just returning them so they can go about it properly.

Nevertheless, we (Oz) cannot solve this world refugee 'crisis', and only a concerted international effort will have any hope of doing so.

It was a mistake to ask the high court for a decision; in cases like this the high court should be left out of the equation. Their decisions are based on legal precedents and point scoring by the legal fraternity. I am sure the government can legislate around these rulings as courts are lost in their own loop in these matters.

The last case was not decided under the constitution, any further cases would be and they would fail because the constitution guarantees any person here the right to appeal to that court.

None of you bogans have a clue about law or human rights or even human decency.

What gives us the right to decide we can dump anyone we like in any other country without actually bothering to ask them or the people we want to dump?

What if all those other countries decide to teach the racist nitwits in our parliament a lesson and dump their 8 million refugees here and tell us we created the problem so we should fix it.