The 'Malaysia solution': has its time now come?

Well, yes, true.

But that would be a moral defect or offence if everybody else involved in this gut-wrenching imbroglio (the refugees, the agents, the overseas parties, and our own distastefully strategising politicians here in Australia) were totally principled in their actions on this matter.

It would be wrong if they were all impelled solely and exclusively by high-minded and altruistic purposes. By personally disinterested motivations, without any taint or hint of self-interest.

That, of course, is not the case. Nobody is totally pure here, not even the refugees.

They too are acting, in part, but in an essential and undeniable part of their motivation, from self-interest: calculating, strategic and instrumental.

So it is not immoral for us, for Australia as a nation, to act here in this matter in those same terms: provided we are acting in “good faith”, seeking to achieve the optimum outcome for all concerned.

Australia too is entitled — so long as it is acting in “good faith” towards attaining an optimum, or bearable, solution for all parties — to act with a measure of calculated and calculating “instrumentalism” in a context where, in common with everybody else, even the refugees themselves are acting with an undeniable and pronounced degree of similar premeditation in their plans to reach and secure asylum here.

It is time for all sides in our national political life to give the “Malaysia solution” some honest consideration.

These last one hundred souls must tell us, if those who have died at sea before them have failed, that the time for shameless, yet also shameful, partisan political “haymaking” on this issue is over.