Gillard and Boat People

Julia Gillard's asylum seeker plan sinking in face of East Timor opposition | News.com.au

Prime Minister Julia Gillard says her solution to Australia's boat people problem is an old idea.

Ms Gillard has admitted she's yet to speak to East Timorese Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao about her proposal to send asylum seekers to a regional processing centre she wants built there.

She said she will speak to Mr Gusmao in coming days, after talks with President Jose Ramos-Horta indicated he was open to discussions about the plan.

But Mr Gusmao's deputy Jose Luis Guterres has already said East Timor was "very unlikely" to agree to Ms Gillard's plan announced earlier this week.

Ms Gillard said regional talks on the boat people issue had for some time included discussions about a regional processing centre.

"This is an idea for a regional processing centre that has been raised and considered for some time," she said.

"What's new is my determination to relentlessly pursue it."

She said Australia was not the only country in the region grappling with the problem of illegal boat arrivals.

"Our officials will now work in the region, with our regional neighbours, to get their views," she said.

Ms Gillard said she had recently spoken about the issue of boat arrivals with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and New Zealand Prime Minister John Key.

"It's a problem in our region and it's appropriate that we work across the region," she said.

East Timor experts have warned that Mr Gusmao has been making strong anti-Australian remarks recently and was likely to extract a high price for his compliance towards Ms Gillard's proposal.

The Telegraph said that Mr Gusmao was still smarting over the Woodside company's decision not to pipe oil and gas from the Timor Sea onshore to Dili, which he believes has cost East Timor hundreds of jobs.

Mr Guterres said yesterday that his country had previously rejected a similar request from former foreign minister Alexander Downer and was still "not in a condition to accept a detention centre".

"It's very unlikely East Timor will accept the proposal," he told The Sydney Morning Herald.

Taken aback

Mr Gusmao's Australian wife, Kirsty Sword, who is visiting Sydney, has expressed her scepticism.

"I must say I was taken aback when I first heard about it," she told the Herald.

"Timor has so many urgent problems in health, education and infrastructure I am not sure it should be distracted by this issue."

Ms Gillard yesterday pledged $25 million to fund a crackdown on people-smuggling across the region, including patrol boats and surveillance planes to help Jakarta's efforts during a discussion with President Yudhoyono.

She said that thousands of Australia-bound asylum seekers in Indonesia could be moved to the processing centre in East Timor if it were built.

Crackdown

Many of the asylum-seekers in the Indonesian camps are young Muslim men and concerns have already been raised about the impact of moving them to largely Catholic East Timor and finding them jobs in a tiny nation that has an unemployment rate of about 40 per cent.

The announcement of additional resources for the regional crackdown came as another boatload of asylum-seekers was intercepted in waters off Australia's northwest.

The boat, with 43 passengers and three crew, took the number of boatpeople arriving in Australia this year to 3575 on 76 separate vessels.

Former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser, a trenchant critic of John Howard's Pacific Solution, yesterday gave the new plan his provisional approval.

"If the Prime Minister can establish this policy and as a consequence remove the incentive to undertake a voyage in dangerous boats under the charge of the people-smugglers, then that's, I believe, a positive result and quite different from a Pacific Solution," he said.

However, Mr Downer, who helped implement the Pacific Solution, predicted the Prime Minister's "new" plan would fail.

"We were pretty desperate"

Mr Downer said Australia approached East Timor, Fiji and Singapore in 2001, before brokering a deal with Nauru to take more than 400 boatpeople rescued by the freighter Tampa.

"We were pretty desperate," the former foreign minister told The Australian.

"I mean there was Howard yelling at me, telling me to find somewhere to send these people. And I'm ringing up Ramos-Horta and I'm ringing up the foreign minister of Singapore and I'm ringing everybody, and they're all saying no."

Ms Gillard distanced her Timor proposal from the Pacific Solution.

"The difference here is we are not acting unilaterally, and we are not doing something quickly for political effect the way the Pacific Solution was done," she said.

But Tony Abbott rejected the plan as a "pre-election pose".

"How can something that was supposedly immoral when done by John Howard be a stroke of political genius when done by Julia Gillard?" Mr Abbott said.