Australian Prime Minister John Howard issued an official statement on Monday, in which he was announcing that he would drop all plans regarding the tough new refugee bill he was planning to launch, given too much pressure this bill attracted from many Australian lawmakers in the Senate, the Associated Press informs.

"There are passionately held majority views in the government on this. I believed in this bill. I still do, but I accept that there aren't the numbers in the Senate to pass it and I'm a realist as well as a democrat", Howard highlighted, referring to the fact that the government's majority of only two in the 76-seat Senate automatically means that if one senator opposes a bill, or two abstain, the legislation is scrapped.

The bill was supposed to be talked upon on Monday but Howard stated that his Cabinet accepted his recommendation regarding the revoking of the bill. The dropping of this bill was described by many to be among the biggest defeats Howard had to face in the last 10 years, during his two Prime Minister mandates.

One of the high points of the debates sprung from the fact that the bill stipulated that anyone who sought asylum in Australia and arrived on the continent by boat, had to be sent to some so-called "island detention camps". Some of the government officials in Howard's own center-right coalition argued that such provision annuls all of Australia's responsibilities to the refugees it receives, because the state wants to appease Indonesia.

The reason why officials brought this argument into debate was because the draft of the bill was elaborated upon after Indonesia withdrew its ambassador from Canberra, following Australia awarding asylum to 43 refugees, who came from the island's province of Papua. The refugees claimed that Papua was the scene of intense human rights violations, which is why they left the place. In turn, Indonesian officials were angered by such allegations.

The bill had been passed by the House of Representatives last week, even though three officials from the Prime Minister's Liberal Party voted against it, alongside the center-left Labor Party.