The resolution I propose for Labor back in power - and for the Opposition once again in opposition, the courts that have dithered on the issue and those newspaper pundits who never understood what was involved - is to make 2008 the year Australia stops messing around with habeas corpus. 

The right to have the courts - not the Crown, governments, ministers or public servants - decide who languishes in the clink, was not easily won.

But habeas corpus has been the backstop guarantee of liberty in the English-speaking world since the time of Charles II. 

Of course, it's always under pressure. It's messy and slow. It's meant to put a brake on power. Governments are always advancing reasons why this or that crisis demands habeas corpus be lifted, limited or fiddled a little. 

After September 11, 2001, President George Bush tried to set up a prison camp at Guantanamo Bay beyond the reach of the courts. He failed. Guantanamo is emptying under pressure from the US Supreme Court. 

Paul Keating, with the enthusiastic co-operation of his political opponents, succeeded in designing a parallel prison system where immigration ministers could, all on their own, detain boat people perhaps forever.  

The system didn't die as Hand promised at the end of 1992. It just kept growing. Once we sidelined habeas corpus in the fight against waterborne asylum seekers, it was easily cut down in the "war on terror". So in 2005 ASIO was given the power to hold witnesses and the Australian Federal Police the power to detain suspects without charge.

The courts weren't excluded but they lost their power to free the innocent.Such measures often play well in the short term.

But eventually John Howard was tainted by the cruelties of the system, by the scandals of Cornelia Rau and hundreds of others wrongly held in detention, by the trauma of men and women lost for years in the "Pacific solution", and by Canberra's long indifference to David Hicks's detention without trial.Mohamed Haneef's case was the nadir.

When the Indian doctor was granted bail by a Queensland magistrate, a government minister took steps to throw him into immigration detention instead. The working principle appeared to be: anything to keep the man behind bars and principle be damned.Amnesia had, by this time, settled on the authors of the original slippage.

Keating took the opportunity before the election to denounce Howard's "WASP-divined jihad against refugees; those wretched individuals who had enough faith in us to try and reach us in old tubs, while his wicked detention policy was presided over by that other psalm singer, Philip Ruddock …

"Back in power, Labor appears to be making good its resolution to shut down the Pacific solution. Seven Burmese refugees were quietly brought in from Nauru before Christmas. All the signs are that the 74 Sri Lankan refugees remaining on the island will be in Australia before the end of January.Labor has already resolved that mandatory detention as it has been known for the past 15 years will end. Instead of being held for the indefinite time it can take to decide their refugee and immigration status, adult asylum seekers will only be detained for identity, health and security checks.

The party's electoral platform promises: "The length and conditions of detention must be subject to review."

What's been left deliberately ambiguous is whether this means abandoning the 1992 policy and allowing full review by the courts: habeas corpus.

All too clear is Labor's sad determination to preserve Christmas Island as a legal limbo for asylum seekers, part of the nation for all purposes except the right of boat people who end up in its $400 million detention centre to claim refugee protection under Australian law.The contrived anomaly of excising the island from Australia's "migration zone" will be the focus of continuing challenge by refugee advocates.

For David Manne of Melbourne's Refugee and Immigration Legal Centre the point is as simple as it's profound: "Refugee status ought to be subject to determination under the rule of law."So here's a simple resolution for 2008: deal the courts back in.

Let's have no more detention in this country at the say-so of government.

Let's be civilised and put habeas corpus back where it belongs.For governments this will be tedious and time-consuming.

But they will be grateful down the track to be spared the detention scandals of the Howard years. January 1 could be the time to start.

It's Time To Let Te Courts Baxk In