When is Australia not Australia? When Papuans want to land on it. The Howard Government is planning yet another contortion of the immigration laws and refugee treaties.

It's no longer enough to excise outlying islands and reefs from Australia, now we must excise Australia from Australia. Any asylum seekers who land anywhere in Australia will be treated as outside Australia's migration zone and put behind barbed wire, probably on the baking, mineral-stripped plateau of Nauru, now too destitute to afford even a telephone service.

And all this to save Australia the embarrassment of embarrassing the Indonesians. The Immigration Minister, Amanda Vanstone, makes it clear this exercise in nastiness is to prevent future asylum seekers from Papua using Australia as a "staging point of protest". That is, to prevent them putting their case to any audience other than immigration officers assessing their application.

Senator Vanstone also seems to think there's something wrong and suspect about Australia becoming a country of first asylum. That's for countries a long way from Australia, she implies. However, Australia's territory is a relatively easy canoe journey across waters that have been traversed by local peoples for centuries, and, moreover, in Papua there are widespread and continuing human rights abuses, as well as a strong separatist cause. If more seek to follow the 43 who landed on Cape York in January – 42 have so far been assessed as having well-founded fears of persecution if they return – it will be because of the actions of Indonesian authorities in Papua.

Senator Vanstone also tries to convince us the "Pacific solution" provides a quicker, more fair hearing of asylum claims. People with a "legitimate" claim would find it easier to win an Australian protection visa because the process is shorter offshore, she says. This is disingenuous: it's shorter because asylum-seekers outside Australia's jurisdiction are denied the appeals available inside the country. Claims are not always immediately clear, and interviews are subjective. By removing reviews and appeals, the Government seriously weakens our adherence to treaty obligations to assess asylum claims thoroughly, as well as making harsh confinement and isolation the first experience of our system.

At least the Government seems to have dropped its earlier notion of asking the Indonesians what they think, and identifying applicants to them. But it still plans joint patrols in the Torres Strait to head off further arrivals.

What will be the rules of engagement for our armed forces and civilian agencies? If boatloads of people are turned back, or into the custody of Indonesian authorities, what will happen to them?

The original "Pacific solution" may have helped police forces stop people-smuggling but it also caused a lot of suffering and trauma. Most of those shipped off to Nauru and Manus Island were eventually assessed to be refugees. Australia was soon at war with two of the regimes involved, and may yet go along with a war against the third. The policy's revival looks even more dodgy and repugnant, and the Government deserves its excoriation by church and legal figures. It should be dropped.