Christmas Island detention centre has become overcrowded.
Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard has kept her promise to get tough on immigration by announcing plans to create new refugee processing centre in East Timor.
Just last week Julia Gillard told the media that Australians should not be labelled as racists just because they expressed concerns over immigration levels in Australia and she promised that political correctness would be swept under the carpet.
She now plans to woo the public further by getting tough on immigration – a political hot potato in Australia for decades.
The new processing centre for refugees will be located in East Timor, where asylum seekers will be held whilst their applications are checked. Ms Gillard claims that this will stop the trade in people smugglers once they realise that boats would be sent to East Timor and not Australia for processing.
The opposition leader has gone one step further than this and announced a return to the Pacific Solution set up by former Prime Minister John Howard, in which boats are turned back and sent to Pacific states such as Papua New Guinea. The Pacific Solution drew some fierce criticism at the time, as charities claimed that Australia was failing its international duties and also that many legitimate refugees were being held for up to three years.
The Pacific Solution was scrapped by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd following his election in 2007. Most boat people are now sent to the Christmas Island detention centre in the Indian Ocean whilst immigrants who travel to Australia by other means are processed on the mainland. This too has led to criticism of prejudice against the boat people who were more likely to be genuine refugees than those who arrive by plane.
Asylum seekers make up a tiny minority of immigration levels in Australia of just 1.6%, however media attention has turned it into a huge debate, with many critics of Rudd claiming that more immigrants were arriving since he scrapped the Pacific Solution.
Ms Gillard isn’t entirely closed to the appeals of the asylum seekers however, since she gained power she has lifted the suspension of refugees from Sri Lanka, however the suspension remains in place for Afghans.
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