Australia will ask the tiny island nation of Nauru, which is already housing 700 boat people shipped from Australia, to process more asylum seekers, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said on Saturday.
Australia is struggling to find more nations to join its controversial Pacific solution where boat people who arrive off its remote shores are shipped to neighbouring islands to stop them claiming refugee status on Australian soil.
Australia has paid Nauru and Papua New Guinea tens of millions of dollars to take hundreds of asylum seekers, but similar approaches to Fiji and Tuvalu have been rejected.
Mr Downer will travel to the South Pacific next week, during which time he will seek a new boat people deal with Nauru.
"I'll be talking to them (Nauru) about a new arrangement while I'm there," Mr Downer told Australian radio today, adding the discussions would focus on whether it would be possible for Nauru to process more people.
The Nauru asylum processing camp was condemned as cruel and demeaning in an Amnesty International report this week.
"The camps are hellish, Dante-like, groups of people are moving around slowly," said John Pace, a former top UN Commissioner for Human Rights, after visiting Nauru to prepare the Amnesty report.
"It's a lunar landscape...it's devastated," he said of conditions on the barren island.
Australia paid Nauru A20 million (£10 million) to build two camps to process 797 asylum seekers, the bulk of whom were rescued by the Norwegian freighter Tampa in the Indian Ocean and brought to Australia's remote Christmas Island in August.
Australia refused to accept the Afghans, claiming they were rescued in Indonesia's search and rescue area and were Jakarta's responsibility. The Tampa incident heralded a new hardline by Australia of turning back boat people who arrive from Indonesia.