Kevin can be forgiven a chuckle. It should do the heart good to be proved right. Kevin Rudd warned against moving further to the right in dealing with boat people than he had gone as Prime Minister. His advice on departing from office was ignored. So too was the advice he proffered to Cabinet from his department when the terrible decision was made to adopt the Malaysian solution.

As yesterday’s High Court judgment made clear the Department of Foreign Affairs got it right and Immigration (and presumably Attorney Generals) got it wrong:

  • … the DFAT advice that was placed before the Minister reflected what the parties to these proceedings agreed is the position. First, the Government of Malaysia is not bound to and does not itself recognise the status of refugee in its domestic law. Second, the Government of Malaysia does not itself undertake any activities related to the reception, registration, documentation or status determination of asylum seekers and refugees. Third, the Government of Malaysia generally permits UNHCR to undertake those tasks within the territory of Malaysia and allows asylum seekers to remain in Malaysia while UNHCR undertakes those activities.
  • The role played by UNHCR in performing these tasks was amplified in the documents emanating from that organisation that were annexed to the briefing paper that went to the Minister. Nothing turns for present purposes on the particular content of those papers or the role that UNHCR has played or would play under the Arrangement.
  • The observations and judgments made in the DFAT advice demonstrated, and the facts that have been agreed for the purposes of these proceedings demonstrate, that none of the first three criteria stated in s 198A(3)(a) was or could be met in the circumstances of these matters.
  • As already explained, the references in s 198A(3)(a) to a country that provides access and provides protection are to be construed as references to provision of access or protection in accordance with an obligation to do so. Where, as in the present case, it is agreed that Malaysia: first, does not recognise the status of refugee in its domestic law and does not undertake any activities related to the reception, registration, documentation and status determination of asylum seekers and refugees; second, is not party to the Refugees Convention or the Refugees Protocol; and, third, has made no legally binding arrangement with Australia obliging it to accord the protections required by those instruments; it was not open to the Minister to conclude that Malaysia provides the access or protections referred to in s 198A(3)(a)(i) to (iii). The Minister’s conclusions that persons seeking asylum have access to UNHCR procedures for assessing their need for protection and that neither persons seeking asylum nor persons who are given refugee status are ill-treated pending determination of their refugee status or repatriation or resettlement did not form a sufficient basis for making the declaration. The jurisdictional facts necessary to making a valid declaration under s 198A(3)(a) were not and could not be established.
  • The Minister’s declaration was made beyond power. It follows that s 198A(1) cannot be engaged to take either plaintiff from Australia to Malaysia. And as earlier demonstrated, s 198 does not supply any power to remove either plaintiff from Australia to Malaysia.

How long will it be before Labor MPs start saying “Come back Kevin, all is forgiven”?

One thing is for certain: he could not do worse than this current Prime Minister.

The American capitalist way. CEO’s earning more than their company tax bill. That reads a bit strange to me but it appears to be the American way. The nonprofit Institute for Policy Studies has just released its report “The Massive CEO Rewards for Tax Dodging” that claims that corporate tax dodging has gone so out of control that 25 major U.S. corporations last year paid their chief executives more than they paid Uncle Sam in federal income taxes.

The Institute researched the 100 U.S. corporations that shelled out the most last year in CEO compensation and found that corporate outlays for CEO compensation — despite the lingering Great Recession — are rising.

Employment levels have barely rebounded from their recessionary lows. Top executive pay levels, by contrast, have rebounded nearly all the way back from their pre-recession levels.

This contrast shows up starkly in the 2010 ratio between average worker and average CEO compensation. In 2009, we calculate, major corporate CEOs took home 263 times the pay of America’s average workers. Last year, this gap leaped to 325-to-1.

Among the nation’s top firms, the S&P 500, CEO pay last year averaged $10,762,304, up 27.8 percent over 2009. Average worker pay in 2010? That finished up at $33,121, up just 3.3 percent over the year before.\

The report says that no tax-dodging strategy over recent years has filled U.S. corporate coffers more rapidly than the “offshoring” of corporate activity to tax havens in low-or-no-tax jurisdictions. Eighteen of the 25 firms highlighted in this study operate subsidiaries in offshore tax haven jurisdictions. The firms, all combined, had 556 tax haven subsidiaries last year.

Tax havens are costing the federal treasury, by one estimate, $100 billion a year. These havens are speeding the transfer of wealth out of local communities and the global south into the bank accounts of the planet’s wealthiest and most powerful. Tax havens, or more accurately “secrecy jurisdictions,” can also facilitate criminal activity, from drug money laundering to the financing of terrorist networks.

The American way after death. The BBC reports that a Glasgow-based company has installed its first commercial “alkaline hydrolysis” unit at a Florida funeral home.

Watch as Resomation founder Sandy Sullivan explains how the machine works

The unit by Resomation Ltd is billed as a green alternative to cremation and works by dissolving the body in heated alkaline water. Apparently it is all very environmentally friendly, producing a third less greenhouse gas than cremation, uses a seventh of the energy, and allows for the complete separation of dental amalgam for safe disposal.

After body tissue is dissolved and the liquid poured into the municipal water system, bones are removed from the unit and processed in a “cremulator”, the same machine that is used to crush bone fragments following cremation into ash.

The facility has been installed at the Anderson-McQueen funeral home in St Petersburg, and will be used for the first time in the coming weeks.

The political bystanders in charge. This gloomy assessment of the inability of the West’s key politicians to created conditions for a speedy restoration of growth does not come from some mad anti-capitalist leftie but from Martin Wolf, the distinguished economic commentator for that voice of capitalism The Financial Times of London:

In neither the US nor the eurozone, does the politician supposedly in charge — Barack Obama, the US president, and Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor — appear to be much more than a bystander of unfolding events … Both are — and, to a degree, operate as — outsiders.

Mr Obama wishes to be president of a country that does not exist. In his fantasy US, politicians bury differences in bipartisan harmony. In fact, he faces an opposition that would prefer their country to fail than their president to succeed.

Ms Merkel, similarly, seeks a non-existent middle way between the German desire for its partners to abide by its disciplines and their inability to do any such thing. The realisation that neither the US nor the eurozone can create conditions for a speedy restoration of growth — indeed the paralysing disagreements over what those conditions might be — is scary.