Rudd's refugee solution: politically brilliant, morally bankrupt

Rational self-interest would command that the refugees would want to give priority to those who are most destitute and have been displaced the longest. This is exactly the principle applied world-wide when it comes to life defining policies, such as our health policy – we triage heart patients before those with a sprained ankle.

Our humanitarian migration quota should be filled by those most lacking in the resources and opportunities that are a pre-condition to human survival and flourishing. We should prefer the perpetually hungry over the ambitiously, impatient mobile.

We have been prevented from doing this because Australia has a capped refugee intake of 20,000 people. On current patterns, the boat arrivals would have taken all these places this year.

Withdrawing from the Convention and making it clear to boat and plane arrivals that they would not be considered for protection visas would have deterred these people from coming to our shores and enabled Australia to proactively settle the people from refugee camps that are suffering the most and/or had been the waiting the longest (the normal wait is well over 10 years).

Moreover, the $4 billion we would have saved on border patrols, mandatory detention facilities and refugee processing meant we could have easily increased our humanitarian intake from 20,000 to well over 40,000 annually.

Instead we now have a humanitarian shambles. And I am pretty sure that every one of the 43 billion people suffering in refugee camps whose sense of hope of ever enjoying any sense of flourishing has been further snuffed out, is not taking solace from the fact that Australia remains 'committed' to the Refugee's Convention.

This episode has been a catastrophic intellectual and compassionate disaster for the Green's and the refugee lobby. This is compounded by their grotesque hypocrisy in now criticizing the Rudd solution. Rudd is simply doing what is facilitated by their badge of honour. It is nonsense to suggest that the Convention is divisible – the freedom for signatory countries to not settle refugees is a core part of the Convention.

Yet there is a way to fix it. Rudd must also state that plane arrivals will not be eligible for refugee settlement. He should then increase the humanitarian intake to at least 40,000 and fill all of these places with those subsisting on the margins of life in refugee camps. This quota should increase annually by at least 10,000 – until we reach the capacity which is politically palatable to the community.

This would make Australia the world exemplar in humanitarian resettlement and provide us refuge from our current shame.