Julia Gillard's asylum seeker announcement today is heavy on rhetoric and light on actual new policy -- but the one announcement of substance is likely to cost taxpayers a lot.

Unedifying, the Prime Minister called it. “How appalling it is that this is where the long-running debate on asylum seekers has taken us,” Ms Gillard said this morning. Indeed, Prime Minister.

The Opposition had, not long before, further toughened its own stand on asylum seekers, adopting a policy already rejected as unworkable under the Howard Government — automatically rejecting people who “deliberately” destroy their identity documentation (good luck with “deliberately”, chaps) and putting the Minister for Immigration back smack in the middle of the process of determining claims for asylum.

Gillard kicked off her speech with a bit of triangulation, trying to contrast herself with both Julian Burnside and Tony Abbott, now the official exemplars of softheadedness and hardheartedness in the debate. But thereafter she hewed rather more closely to the Abbott end of the debate than Burnside’s.

Like the Pacific Solution before it, hastily cobbled together by Alexander Downer in 2001 when he picked up the phone to Nauru’s Rene Harris and told him to name his price for taking the Tampa asylum seekers, the East Timor Solution has been knocked together with a quick phone call to another leader of another state dependent on Australia — this time Jose Ramos-Horta.

Lucky our region is dotted with these client states of ours, isn’t it?

Ramos-Horta clearly hasn’t agreed to anything except to talk about a “regional processing centre”, but given how heavily dependent East Timor is on us, it probably won’t take long to get it up and running.

It will be different from the Pacific Solution, Gillard suggested, because it will be within a “regional protection framework” and involve the UNHCR, whom she had also consulted, along with John Key, New Zealand PM. New Zealand, like Australia, is one of the few countries in these parts that is a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention.

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East Timor is as well, meaning the difference between this and the Pacific Solution won’t merely be geographic, but the effect is the same, send asylum claimants to a handy and none-too-appealing offshore destination to await processing.

For asylum seekers from both Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, rejection rates had been rising anyway before processing of their claims was suspended by Kevin Rudd. However, rising rejection rates weren’t sending a sufficiently strong message — not so much to Tamils in Sri Lanka or Afghans in refugee camps in Pakistan, as to Australian voters. Without actually changing policy — asylum claims will still be considered on their merits for Sri Lankans now that the suspension has been lifted — Gillard was today aiming for a soundbite that made it clear the Tamils who were actually allowed to settle here would be few and far between.

Given the ongoing negotiations with the Afghan Government over repatriation arrangements, a similar fate awaits Afghan asylum seekers when that suspension is lifted later in the year, particularly with Gillard emphasising that up to 70% of claims from Afghans were being rejected anyway.

Again, without changing policy, Gillard sought to address the persistent and noxious myth — that survives primarily thanks to radio shock jocks — that refugees are given extensive and generous taxpayer assistance when they are settled. Language like “we will ensure refugees shoulder the same obligations as Australians generally” is clearly intended to play to the fears of inveterate racists in the community.

Gillard hasn’t exactly tried to outflank Tony Abbott to the right on the issue, but that’s primarily because there is little new policy here. A promise to try to coax East Timor and the UNHCR into allowing us to dump Christmas Island detainees over there, a statement that asylum applicants who are knocked back will be sent home as happens now, vague talk of “shouldering obligations”, are of a piece with Gillard’s weekend encouragement of people to have their say on the issue, as if xenophobes had felt in any way stymied until now in attacking asylum seekers.

If the one hard commitment Gillard made proceeds, it will be hideously expensive. The Pacific Solution was estimated to have cost around $1b over five years. The Dili version won’t be any cheaper. We’re also forking out for eight new patrol boats to guard our north-western and northern waters.

Taxpayers will be wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on several thousand asylum seekers, to assuage the xenophobic instincts of a few swinging voters in marginal electorates. Unedifying indeed.