SYDNEY – Australian prime minister has Julia Gillard unveiled a new asylum policy aimed at allaying voter fears about rising boatpeople numbers ahead of elections, with the centrepiece a possible East Timor processing centre.
Conservative opposition leader Tony Abbott also released his asylum policy yesterday, saying he would “turn back the boats” by restoring the “Pacific solution” of mandatory offshore island detention and temporary protection visas for boatpeople arrivals.
There are only 4,251 unauthorised arrivals in Australian detention currently, but while the numbers are small, border protection is a “hot button” issue with voters, which saw conservative parties win a stunning election victory in 2001. Last month, the asylum-seeker issue saw the ruling Labor Party lose a key state by-election in western Sydney.
Ms Gillard rejected charges her new policy was aimed at “rednecks in marginal seats”, with marginal seats in mortgage belt Australia likely to determine the election expected in August. Ms Gillard is on course for a narrow victory.
She conceded however that the mortgage belt suburbs of outer Sydney and Melbourne had legitimate concerns when it came to rising population pressures, stretching infrastructure.
“It is wrong to label people who have concerns about unauthorised arrivals as ‘rednecks’,” Ms Gillard said in a speech in Sydney yesterday. “There are racists in every country but expressing a desire for a clear and firm policy to deal with a very difficult problem does not make you a racist.
“For too long, the asylum seeker policy debate [in Australia] has been polarised by extreme, emotionally-charged claims.”
Ms Gillard said she had held discussions with East Timor president José Ramos-Horta and the United Nations about establishing a regional asylum processing centre in East Timor.
“The government’s policy goal is . . . to wreck the people-smuggling trade by removing the incentive for boats to leave their port of origin [and] . . . to remove both the profitability of the trade and the danger of the voyage,” Ms Gillard said.
Conservative parties won the 2001 poll in which border protection was the key issue and then implemented a hardline Pacific solution of detaining asylum seekers on Pacific and Indian Ocean island camps.
When Labor won office at the end of 2007, it ended the Pacific solution and mandatory detention of asylum seekers, but kept a Christmas Island detention centre in the Indian Ocean and this year opened an outback camp to cope with rising numbers.
Aid and humanitarian groups questioned the government’s new asylum policy and rejected outright the opposition’s policy.
“If what the government has in mind is simply a rebadged Pacific solution then this is . . . unacceptable,” said Amnesty International Australia’s national director Claire Mallins.
Ms Gillard said offshore wars and unrest drove asylum seekers, not domestic policies of detention.
Ms Gillard said Australia would lift a suspension on processing claims for Sri Lankans, after a UN report said Tamils were no longer at risk, but that a suspension on Afghan claims would remain. – (Reuters)