Tips for Monday, August 5 On its face, the PNG and Nauru solutions cannot work. First of all, and intractably, the real world figures don't correspond to anything the government is describing. But most embarrassingly, the PNG government keeps contradicting the Rudd government as to the terms and conditions of the solution. The most important statement on illegal arrivals over the weekend came not from Nauru but from PNG's Planning Minister, Charles Abel, who said explicitly that the PNG government was not expecting large numbers of asylum-seekers to come to PNG. Yet the Rudd government keeps telling us that all new arrivals are going to PNG, or now possibly Nauru as well. The PNG government, notwithstanding the vast aid it will get from the Rudd government and its general desire to go along politically, keeps contradicting this. More important, the numbers keep contradicting this in the most implacable way. Over the weekend, government sources spoke of building a tent city of 10,000 on Manus Island, but there is no sign from anyone in Port Moresby that this would be remotely acceptable to the PNG government. The government also spoke of sending women and children to Nauru. But there are no facilities on Nauru to do this and there won't be for months at least. In the meantime, we see that the budget makes provision for new detention facilities in Australia, almost certainly for women and children... One minute before an election, the government has announced an apparently limitless program without the resources to back it, the planning behind it or the co-operation of the other governments that will be central to it coming to fruition.