Australia will refuse entry to asylum seekers who arrive by boat and send them to neighbouring Papua New Guinea, in a pre-election policy prime minister Kevin Rudd described as a "hardline decision".
“Any asylum seeker who arrives in Australia by boat will have no chance of being resettled in Australia,” Mr Rudd told reporters in Brisbane today, standing alongside Papua New Guinea prime minister Peter O’Neill.
“If they’re found to be genuine refugees they’ll be resettled in Papua New Guinea.”
Mr Rudd has made tackling the number of asylum seekers making the journey to Australia by boat a priority before elections that must be held by the end of November. Five people have drowned since July 12th in incidents in seas between northwest Australia and Indonesia, and the issue has eroded support for the ruling Labour party amid pledges by opposition leader Tony Abbott to "stop the boats".
"This is a radical plan with far-reaching implications," Sharon Pickering, a professor at the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University, said by phone.
"It's hard to see how this policy will be able to work within the spirit of the convention," she said, in reference to the 1951 United Nations refugee convention.
Successive Australian governments have struggled with boat arrivals from Southeast Asia since the late 1970s, when then- prime minister Malcolm Fraser granted entry to more than 2,000 refugees from the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
Then-leader Julia Gillard last year reopened processing centers in Papua New Guinea and Nauru, a return to former prime minister John Howard's policy of holding applicants in offshore processing camps or remote onshore detention centers.
“I understand this is a very hardline decision,” Mr Rudd said today. “Australians are people with hard heads but also kind and compassionate hearts.” The agreement with Papua New Guinea did not put a limit on the number of people who could be sent there, he said.
Australia will expand a detention center on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island about five-fold to house about 3,000 asylum seekers, immigration minister Tony Burke told reporters in Brisbane.
Children will be removed from the center and the facilities will be improved, he said. Mr Rudd said the resettlement plan would be neutral for Australia’s budget, with a statement on the costs of the policy to be put forward later.
Mr Rudd is seeking to build a platform ahead of the election, announcing changes to policies put in place by Ms Gillard which proved unpopular with voters, including a pricing system for carbon. Since he ousted Ms Gillard last month in a party room vote, Mr Rudd’s Labour has erased a deficit in opinion polls to Abbott’s Liberal-National coalition.
Bloomberg