When Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan delivered the national budget yesterday, he blamed the nation's $17.8 billion deficit on the stubbornly high Australian dollar, softening company-tax revenue and a slowdown of the China-driven mining sector. But an estimated $2 billion to $3 billion of that deficit (the true figure won't be known until September) comes from the blowout of the government's controversial border-protection budget.
And for that there's nothing and nobody to blame but the ruinously expensive policy known in Australia as the "Pacific Solution." Conceived as a deterrent against illegal immigration by former Prime Minister John Howard in 2001, the policy has seen thousands of mostly Afghani and Iraqi boat people intercepted at sea after leaving Indonesia on rickety boats. They are then interned at offshore detention centers — essentially squalid tent cities — in Pacific backwaters like Nauru and Papua New Guinea's Manus Island, which are breeding grounds for malaria and mental illness. The solution was described as "costly, unsustainable and wrong as a matter of principle" by current Prime Minister Julia Gillard when in opposition in 2003 and suspended when her party was swept to power in 2007. But following a sharp increase in boats — attributed in part to a new wave of Tamil asylum seekers fleeing poverty and persecution in Sri Lanka — Gillard reintroduced the Pacific Solution in August. (MORE: Why Does Australia Want to Send Refugees to Malaysia?) As a deterrent, the policy is a failure: the boats have kept on coming and then some. Stretched to breaking point, Australian naval and police vessels have plucked more than 20,429 asylum seekers from leaky fishing boats in the Indian Ocean since the start of this financial year on July 1. Based on current projections, the opposition has predicted the cost of border protection under the Pacific Solution will rise as high as $6.38 billion across the next three years — a $5.18 billion overspend on the $1.2 billion Swan originally budgeted for the same period. Australia's foreign-aid budget will be raided to make up some of the(http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=world.time.com&blog=19871253&post=86389&subd=timeglobalspin&ref=&feed=1)
Via: TIME GlobalSpin