Australia and asylum-seekers: Julia's about-turn A STREAM of asylum-seekers making for Australia in flimsy boats has left a wake of human misery in the waters north of the country. In the 11 years to June, 960-odd asylum-seekers and crew have vanished at sea while trying to reach Australia, about two-thirds of them in the past three years alone. Amid a bitter political storm over the issue, on August 13th the prime minister, Julia Gillard, performed an abrupt U-turn. She announced that the government would start sending boat people to have their refugee claims processed in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the tiny Pacific island-state of Nauru, a practice that Ms Gillard's Labor Party had once decried. The prime minister is betting on her move deterring more boats and saving lives. Her political gamble is even riskier. The asylum camps on Nauru and Manus Island in PNG are the legacy of John Howard, a former Liberal (ie, conservative) prime minister. In 2001 his government set up the camps for his "Pacific Solution" for turning boat people away from Australia. Human-rights groups, and a few in Mr Howard's own party, denounced the strategy: asylum-seekers could languish in the remote camps for years. The critics included Ms Gillard, who once called the Pacific Solution "costly, unsustainable and wrong." After Labor won power in 2007 it closed the camps and processed boat people on Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, as well as on the mainland. But Mr Howard had sown the seed for one of the more corrosive debates in Australia's political history. As boat arrivals grew, Tony Abbott, leader of the Liberal opposition, called for a return to the Pacific Solution. The 7,120 boat people who landed in the first seven months of this year were more than for each of the previous two years. After more boat people drowned in June, and parliament failed to find a new approach, Ms Gillard appointed a panel headed by Angus Houston, a former chief of Australia's armed forces. Citing the "appalling reality" of lost lives, the panel called for a region-wide strategy to discourage boat people. Until then, it said, Nauru and PNG should be reopened for processing. It also said the government should again pursue a "people swap" plan Ms Gillard had discussed with Malaysia. Before Australia's High Court disallowed it last year, this would have involved Malaysia accepting 800 boat people from Australia in return for Australia taking 4,000 approved refugees from camps in Malaysia. Putting Malaysia on hold for now, Ms Gillard rushed legislation through parliament to kick-start Nauru and Manus Island. Anyone who boarded a boat from now on, she said, risked being sent to either place. She placed no limit on the time that people could be held there. Boat arrivals slowed to a trickle in the wake of the original Pacific Solution. Yet some agree with the head of Australia's immigration department, who last year told a parliamentary committee that the Pacific Solution would not work again. People-smugglers in Indonesia, where most boat people embark, have twigged that most asylum-seekers dumped on Nauru were eventually settled as refugees in Australia. If backing down and returning to the Howard path does not deter boats this time, the opposition can hardly blame Ms Gillard. For now, at least, the growing number of critics in her own party are holding their fire.