The structure of the Government's latest improvisation in asylum seeker policy is familiar.
It has agreed with Malaysia to accept 4000 refugees in exchange for sending 800 asylum seekers to Malaysia. In addition it is working with Papua New Guinea to open a regional processing centre there. Like the original proposal to open a regional processing centre in East Timor, it involves offering a posy of attractive promises that conceal the thorn of the surrender of principle.
It will appeal to those who are politically numerate and ethically illiterate.
The principle that is breached in the Malaysia deal is the Government's commitment through the Refugee Convention to provide asylum to refugees who claim protection as refugees in Australian territory. The Convention also commits Australia to prevent the return of refugees to the nations in which they faced persecution.
This principle should be non-negotiable, and buttressed by the refusal to send asylum seekers to nations that have not signed the Convention. Malaysia has not done so. No international agreements prevent it from returning refugees to death or persecution.
The Government argues that the Malaysian Government has offered guarantees that the 800 asylum seekers will be well treated, and that they will be documented and processed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
The UNHCR judgment of refugee claims, however, is not well resourced. Nor is it a statutory process subject to the rule of law. So it is inferior even to the process available to the asylum seekers who at present claim asylum in Australian waters, unsatisfactory though that process also is.
Nor can weight be placed on the promise of the Malaysian Government to treat the exchanged asylum seekers well, unless the promise is guaranteed by legislation. Malaysia already regards the presence of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants as a problem.
The problem is addressed locally by dissuasion. Asylum seekers, even those designated as persons of interest to the United Nations or who have been found to be refugees, together with illegal immigrants and those who have overstayed their visitors are routinely stopped, searched and beaten, and are subject to extortion, jailing, caning, and often deportation.
Indeed, some asylum seekers who spent some time in Malaysia before fleeing to Australia have made a claim for protection from persecution in Malaysia as well as in their home nation.
Given the indiscriminate, and often extra-judicial, violence that illegal immigrants and asylum seekers face, it is unlikely that asylum seekers sent there by Australia will be exempt from it unless given special legal protection. If they are placed in detention centres, they will also live in impoverished and unhygienic conditions.
Of course Australians who place their trust in deterrence may well see in this account of the conditions that asylum seekers may face in Malaysia the answer to Australia's problem with boat arrivals and people smugglers.
Ethically, however, the great difficulty of the Malaysian solution is that it treats people as pawns. It assumes that Australia can be absolved from dealing with the claims of the persons who come directly to us by the fact that it chooses to accept another larger group of people. The tears of the 800 who are rejected can be ignored in the rejoicing over the 4000 who are chosen.
The acceptance of the 4000 refugees, of course, is to be welcomed. Such gestures form an essential part of any regional solution. But it cannot be a trade-off for sending away people who are Australia's responsibility without explicit guarantees that their human dignity will be respected.
Respect for the human rights of refugees to security, food, shelter and medical care and to plan their lives must be non-negotiable in any regional agreement.
Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who died in the Holocaust, described a refugee as a parcel that is stamped and sent from post office to post office. That is the case with asylum seekers in Australia, who are taken without notice from Christmas Island to Darwin, then perhaps to Melbourne, to Sydney and back to Darwin. All the things that constitute respect for humanity are lacking in their treatment.
But the Malaysian solution adds another dimension to Anne Frank's analogy. It is like solving the problem of overloaded post offices by sending incoming parcels straight to the shredder. Not really fair, even for parcels. And certainly not for human beings.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.