Rules making it more difficult for people to gain permanent residence in Australia have been necessary to stop an increasing flow of people, by no means all of them genuine refugees, who have used people smugglers to enter Australia unlawfully. These rules have been seen, correctly, as necessary to maintain the integrity of Australia's immigration policies, including its refugee program.

There has been public disquiet, however, with the application of some of the new rules. Under Philip Ruddock, the Immigration Minister, this has often been seen as needlessly harsh. The miserable saga of the Woomera detention camp exemplifies the tension between the need for rules and the need for compassion, especially where the health and welfare of children is a concern. It is a black mark against Mr Ruddock and the Government that they seem unable to see that the perfect enforcement of rules is not always the highest objective of government.

One test of the rules has been the handling of the cases of several hundred East Timorese who fled to Australia during the period of increasingly brutal Indonesian rule and whom the Government now insists should return to their liberated homeland. The Government refuses to grant these people an amnesty.

Mr Ruddock says the delay in determining the applicants' cases was the result of their actions in seeking to win refugee status. "If you have migration rules that operate on that basis, every unlawful [immigrant] that comes to Australia would simply say: 'All I've got to do is outwit you and stay in the community long enough and eventually you'll say it's all too ... hard, I'm entitled to stay."

This is a familiar argument from Mr Ruddock. But it is surely undermined in the cases of East Timorese who had strong claims for refugee status but were never granted it. A former member of the Refugee Review Tribunal says that it was the Government, not the applicants, who from 1995 effectively strung out the process of determining applications for refugee status by East Timorese.

If so, it is hardly fair to insist, many years later, and especially when they have put down roots in Australia, that these people return to East Timor even though there is no longer any danger to them there.

A spokeswoman for Mr Ruddock says the reason claims for refugee status were not processed after 1995 was that East Timorese in Australia had been entitled to apply for Portuguese citizenship but had declined to do that. Yet the department's reasoning on the Portuguese nationality option for East Timorese was rejected by the Federal Court in three cases, in 1997, 1998 and 2000.

It is all very well for Mr Ruddock to insist on the strict application of the rules. But the rules have been applied harshly and – in relation to at least some East Timorese refugees – appear to have been subverted by officials dealing with the rules' application. The case, therefore, for tempering the rules with compassion is strong.