No entry, wrong way, go back

As a wave rises, the asylum seeker on the deck of the overcrowded Indonesian fishing boat has his first glimpse of the imposing navy patrol boat in the distance. Already, he has seen a plane circling above and waved, hoping it had flown from Australia. Now, his fervent wish is that the approaching vessel will take him to a new home, a new life.

The date is September 8, 2013, and the Iranian asylum seeker - we will call him Nouri - is the first test of a new prime minister's promise to turn a three-word slogan into a real policy that will begin to ''stop the boats'' from day one (assuming, of course, that the polls are right and the Coalition has a comfortable victory).

The captain of the patrol boat has been instructed to turn back boats like this one when it is safe to do so, but it is immediately apparent that this craft is in imminent danger of sinking. Turning it back towards Indonesia is not an option.

After this assessment is relayed to the taskforce in Canberra charged with overseeing Operation Sovereign Borders (soon to be headed by a three-star military commander), Nouri and the others are taken aboard the patrol boat and subjected to health checks. The asylum seeker is overcome by a sense of relief that his long journey from Tehran is over. In truth, it has barely begun.

With the others, he is taken to a ''transit port'' in Indonesia (agreed in a phone call between Tony Abbott and the Indonesian President the previous day). He is then ferried to the nearest airport and flown to Nauru to join hundreds of other asylum seekers, now including families with young children, who were sent there under the policies of the Gillard and Rudd governments.

Unlike those already there, the Coalition's expectation is that he will be assessed quickly and sent back to where he came from if his claim for refugee status is weak.

In the event that he is found to be a refugee, the intention is to find another country that will take him, though history suggests this will not happen. More likely, he will end up in Australia on a temporary protection visa, with no right to be reunited with immediate family members and no certainty that the visa will be renewed after three years.

But Nouri doesn't have a passport and is suspected of deliberately destroying his travel documents, so he won't be processed - and the pressure on him to voluntarily return to Iran will be immense. If he resists, he faces the prospect of spending years on the tiny, sweltering island.

Should Labor retain power, Nouri is more likely to find himself on Manus Island. The suspicion that he destroyed his travel documents, probably on the advice of the people smuggler who organised the journey, means he will be at the back of the processing queue and, if his claim for refugee status is eventually upheld, he will be offered resettlement in PNG, a country with a high crime rate that struggles to provide basic services to its own people.

Either way, he faces years of uncertainty. For all the sniping and carping, both sides of politics are committed to a suite of policies that aim to deter asylum seekers from risking their lives on leaky boats by punishing those who have done just that. Only the form of punishment differs.

The same applies to those who arrived before Kevin Rudd announced on July 19 that no future arrivals would be able to settle in Australia.

Under Labor's policy, those asylum seekers who arrived after August 13 last year and before July 19 are subject to a ''no advantage test'', whereby they will not be settled any quicker than if they had waited to have their claims processed in transit countries.

As it turned out those who arrived during this period were too numerous to send to the re-opened camps on Manus Island and Nauru, so they were released into the Australian community on bridging visas, but without the right to work.

If Abbott becomes PM, this group of some 30,000 will compete for the attention of the new immigration minister, Scott Morrison, who will be focused on ''stopping the boats''.

But Morrison has a plan for them, too, though many of the details such as what access they will have to legal support and what level of government funds will flow to agencies committed to helping asylum seekers prepare their cases, have not been made public.

A new regime for processing refugees' claims is promised, one that limits legal support and eventually abolishes the existing Refugee Review Tribunal.

As shadow immigration spokesman, Morrison has been the here-there-everywhere critic of what he relentlessly decries as Labor's ''border protection failure''.

He has set himself as the minister who will end the people-smuggling trade to Australia, and so deliver on one of Abbott's core promises.

He has long argued the case for returning to the policies of the Howard government, and has made repeated excursions to PNG, Nauru, Indonesia, Malaysia and Sri Lanka. A policeman's son, he is the combative, polarising face of one of Abbott's signature policies.

In government, Morrison will have to justify any boats that slip though the Coalition's border controls. He will also be judged on how he deals with the so-called legacy caseload - which Morrison defines as any asylum seeker in the system before September 7.

The Coalition argues that it will succeed where Labor has failed for two main reasons: because it has the resolve to do what it takes; and because its policy has never deviated, while Labor has moved to an even tougher policy after dismantling the Pacific Solution.

The first is subjective, but the Coalition does have the record of the Pacific Solution to point to.

The second is true, up to a point. While the key planks - turning back the boats when safe to do so, re-introducing TPVs and offshore processing - have been Coalition policy for a decade, some of the detail that has emerged during the campaign is new and invites scepticism.

Last week, for instance, Abbott and Morrison announced that an ''Indonesian community engagement program'' would include a ''capped boat buy-back scheme'' to encourage owners of unsafe boats to sell them to government officials rather than to people smugglers.

The response from Mahfudz Siddiq, the head of Indonesia's parliamentary commission for foreign affairs, was emphatic: ''This is really a crazy idea, unfriendly, derogatory and it shows lack of understanding in this matter.''

The legacy cases will be subject to the reintroduced temporary protection visas. That is assuming they pass a ''Rapid Assessment'' of their case - an interview by a case officer with a decision promised within 14 days.

(No announcement has yet been made by the Coalition about whether the legal help the government now funds to assist these claims will continue).

For those who fail the assessment, a ''Rapid Review'' will be initiated by another case officer. At this point the asylum seeker is given an information kit, in their own language, instructing them how to present their claims. Again, there appears to be no role for a lawyer. Another 14 days is allowed for a decision to be handed down.

Fail again, and it's ''Rapid Removal''. This will happen within 21 days, according to the plan, so just seven weeks after the election, deportations could theoretically begin.

The system is based on the British model, but may go further. In that country there are certain exemptions from rapid assessment - for women over 24 weeks pregnant, children under 18 years, and people with evidence of being tortured.

''We would be reviewing the applicability of those exemptions to the Australian situation,'' Morrison says. ''However, given the standard of our [detention] centres, particularly for families at places like [Darwin's] Blaydin and Wickham Point, such exemptions may not be necessary.''

As for future arrivals, Morrison is emphatic on one point: no asylum seeker arriving by boat will be processed in Australia. Critical of the time the Labor government has taken to set up centres on Nauru and Manus, his message is that the Coalition will do whatever it takes to ensure new arrivals are sent to these centres almost as soon as they are intercepted.

''Individuals should not assume they will be taken to Christmas Island,'' he says.

The ideal scenario emerging in the Coalition's pre-election plans for border control is that Nouri never gets onto a vessel in Indonesia, from where the majority of boats still depart.

''Wardens'', respected local villagers being paid by Australia and provided with communications equipment, will warn Indonesian police of any impending boat voyage; the ''buy-back scheme'' will deny smugglers access to boats; and, in exceptional cases, ''bounty payments'' will be offered for information leading to significant disruptions or arrests.

But even assuming these schemes can work - an open question, given the patchy quality of intelligence when cash is offered as a reward and the sheer number of boats present across the Indonesian archipelago - they will take time to implement.

The most contentious of all the Coalition's plans is still the proposal to turn back boats ''when safe to do so''. The navy has warned of the potential hazards and Indonesia is steadfastly opposed to the policy, but Abbott insists it will work because it has had some success in the past.

Significantly, since the last election Abbott has moderated his expectations of how quickly his policies will work. The promise now is to make a difference from ''day one'' and to achieve success in the first three years.

Tony Burke, who was appointed Immigration Minister when Rudd returned to the prime ministership, is similarly cautious about nominating when Labor's new policy will stop the boats.

The impression he gives is that, if and when the policy of permanently resettling arrivals in PNG stops people getting on boats, the government will follow through on less controversial proposals from the Gillard government's expert panel to promote regional processing, better treatment of asylum seekers in transit countries, and more rapid resettlement in Australia and other countries such as New Zealand, Canada and the US.

Lawyer David Manne says the reality is that there is little, if any, difference between the major parties. ''Both have a set of measures designed to punish the very people we're meant to be protecting,'' he says.

''Conscious and calculated cruelty is not a necessity - it's a choice. We need a new 'ethics of protection', which fuses the core legal, moral and practical dimensions of protection so that policy is based on protecting, not punishing, promoting human dignity, not abusing it.''

Another challenge facing whoever wins on September 7 concerns the fate of more than 48 refugees dubbed security threats by ASIO and who, in some cases, have been held in detention for more than four years.

After a successful High Court challenge last year, Labor asked the retired Federal Court judge Margaret Stone to review the cases and, so far, only two have had their assessments lifted (another two have been released after ASIO said it no longer considered them a danger).

Last week the United Nations Human Rights Committee issued a scathing judgment of the treatment of the refugees, concluding that their indefinite detention was illegal and calling for their release.

While Labor set up the process, the Coalition appears likely to shut down the review of the cases by Margaret Stone and ignore the report of the human rights committee.

For voters repelled by what they see as the harshness of major parties' policies on boat arrivals, the Greens promise to strip away deterrents and introduce a policy that would close the offshore centres, dramatically increase Australia's refugee intake and appoint an Australian envoy to help broker a regional response.

The hard truth, however, is that Nouri's fate will be determined by the major parties and it looks grim indeed.