Praise be to the High Court. Sanity and decency prevail at last. Thursday's stunning full bench judgment in favour of two Sri Lankan asylum seekers has blown away the hateful farce of so-called ''offshore processing''.

In essence, the court ruled that if you are detained by Australian officialdom or its agents - no matter where that might be - then you have the protection of Australian law.

No more can any government, Coalition or Labor, turn a blind eye to a claim for asylum on the pretext that the applicant is outside the artificially contrived ''migration zone''.

This chucks a mighty spanner in the works. Boat people must now get a fair hearing, whether they are at Christmas Island or Woop Woop. With any luck, we might have seen the last of the increasingly distasteful spectacle of Julia Gillard traipsing around the region pleading with unsympathetic Asian leaders to back a ''detention centre'' in East Timor or wherever.

There will be fury from the refugee-bashers, howls of rage about unelected judges out of touch with community opinion. The cry will go up in support of Tony Abbott's mad suggestion that we should think about electing judges.

He was talking about the supposedly weak sentences handed out in criminal courts, but the message was clear: ''If judges don't treat this kind of thing appropriately, sooner or later, we will do something that we've never done in this country. We will elect judges,'' he said. ''And we will elect judges that will better reflect what we think is our sense of anger at this kind of thing.''

This is perhaps the stupidest idea Abbott has ever had. In those American states where judges are elected, lawyers with deep pockets and murky connections run for the bench in blatantly political campaigns. The system is rife with corruption.

If we try it here we might as well hand over judicial appointments to the radio shock jocks.

Mike Carlton