Gillard needs Abbott's help on refugees

Prime Minister Julia Gillard will tomorrow launch what appears likely to be her own voyage to disaster when she introduces legislation to sidestep the High Court's ban on the refugee swap agreement with Malaysia.

Unless she can swing an 11th-hour deal with Opposition leader Tony Abbott the law will founder, leaving the Government without a policy on asylum seekers arriving by boat from Indonesia.

Because legal advice has ruled that the High Court's Malaysian veto applies equally to former Liberal Prime Minister John Howard's alternatives of Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, Gillard's only real option will be the processing of asylum applications on mainland Australia.

While this is supported by Labor's left wing, the Greens and refugee and human rights groups, it would represent a humiliating defeat for Gillard and open her ailing minority Government to further devastating fire from the Opposition.

Late yesterday the Coalition seemed likely to continue a policy of no quarter.

Last week Gillard had won a fragile victory over the left in a caucus debate that put Labor's survival ahead of deep misgivings over legislation drafted to hand the immigration minister power to implement policies regarded as the best option for dealing with asylum seekers.

The proposed amendments to the Migration Act would not only allow the Government to go ahead with its plan to exchange 800 asylum seekers for 4000 United Nations-accredited refugees from Malaysia, but also open to way for future changes by a Coalition government.

But key figures of the Labor left yesterday rejected the plan after seeing the details, and Abbott attacked the amendments in Parliament after a 15-minute meeting with Gillard.

Abbott said the latest draft paid only lip service to the required human rights protections demanded by the UN Refugee Convention and he would now take his own set of amendments to the party room.

The Opposition rejects the Malaysian deal and wants Nauru reopened.

Under the new draft amendments the immigration minister would be required to consider the national interest in any policy on asylum seekers, and to consider whether a country to which they might be sent met the principal obligations of the UN Refugee Convention.

This meant that people should not be returned to a place where they would face persecution, Gillard said.

She said the issue was too important to be treated as "politics as usual" and that Australians wanted a solution in the national interest.

"I'm resolved that we are able, as a nation, to still have offshore processing," she said.

But without Abbott's support the law is doomed.

The Greens, who control the balance of power in the Senate, yesterday repeated their determination to vote the legislation down.

Immigration spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young said the debate had become "an auction on who can be the meanest, the nastiest and the cruellest", and leader Bob Brown described the proposed legislation as an "onslaught against simple humanity and the rule of law".