Detention plans stir rebel Libs: [2 All-round First Edition]
Samantha Maiden, Political correspondent, Additional reporting: John Stapleton. The Australian [Canberra, A.C.T] 17 Apr 2006: 1.
Abstract
The Government's decision to force all illegal arrivals, including children, who reach mainland Australia by boat into offshore immigration detention centres could sideline reforms introduced in June in response to a backbench revolt led by Liberal MP Petro Georgiou.
Mr Georgiou, who is in a bitter preselection battle to retain his seat of Kooyong in Melbourne, led a campaign last year that saw the Government soften its detention policy, including removing children from detention centres and putting them into community detention.
The Opposition sought to capitalise on the ructions within the Government, with Labor immigration spokesman Tony Burke warning that a range of reforms introduced last year in relation to children and families in detention were under threat. Mr Burke said there was no official classification of the Nauru and Manus Island facilities as detention centres, leaving open the prospect of children being locked up.
THE prospect of children returning to detention under the Howard Government's tough new rules for dealing with boatpeople threatens to rekindle a rebellion among Coalition MPs.
The Government's decision to force all illegal arrivals, including children, who reach mainland Australia by boat into offshore immigration detention centres could sideline reforms introduced in June in response to a backbench revolt led by Liberal MP Petro Georgiou.
Raising the threat of a new split in Coalition ranks, Liberal MPs warned last night they would withhold their support for the changes until further details were provided, including how the children would be treated.
Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone confirmed last night that children would be held in detention centres on the Pacific island of Nauru, but said they would only be locked up at night.
"Unauthorised arrivals moved to Nauru are accommodated under Nauruan visa arrangements," she said. "These visa arrangements have allowed open-centre arrangements, with the asylum-seekers only required to be in the centre overnight. Once the asylum-seekers have been processed they will be relocated to a third country as soon as possible."
Mr Georgiou, who is in a bitter preselection battle to retain his seat of Kooyong in Melbourne, led a campaign last year that saw the Government soften its detention policy, including removing children from detention centres and putting them into community detention.
The Government announced last week it was extending its 2001 "Pacific solution" after a diplomatic stoush with Indonesia over the granting of temporary protection visas to 42 Papuans who made it to the Australian mainland by boat.
The changes require illegal entrants to Australia, whether they reach the mainland or not, to be sent to one of three immigration detention centres for processing -- Nauru, Christmas Island and Papua New Guinea's Manus Island.
Mr Georgiou was unavailable for comment last night, but NSW Liberal MP Bruce Baird said he would consider carefully the proposal to detain all asylum-seekers who arrived by boat.
"I am concerned with some aspects of the proposal," Mr Baird said. "In particular, the role of other countries in terms of deciding an asylum-seeker claim on the basis of national interest."
Liberal senator Marise Payne said she would seek more information on the arrangements when parliament resumed. But Liberal MP Rusell Broadbent, who joined Mr Georgiou and others in pushing for changes to the detention regime for women and children, said he was not concerned at this stage.
"I would expect the same circumstances that have operated for the past six months would apply," he said. "We don't lock children behind razor wire.
"As long as we haven't encroached on our international obligations, I will be supporting the Government."
World Vision chief Tim Costello said he would lobby the four Liberal backbenchers who showed "clarity and conscience" last year in pushing for children to be freed from detention.
If the practice was "cruel and wrong here onshore, as I think the amendments last year finally admitted, then it is cruel and wrong offshore".
The Opposition sought to capitalise on the ructions within the Government, with Labor immigration spokesman Tony Burke warning that a range of reforms introduced last year in relation to children and families in detention were under threat. Mr Burke said there was no official classification of the Nauru and Manus Island facilities as detention centres, leaving open the prospect of children being locked up.
"All of that is contingent upon people being held in what is defined as a detention centre. Manus Island and Nauru are not," he told the Nine Network.
"That means under John Howard's proposal, children in detention can happen again. We can see indefinite detention back. All of the changes that were heralded last year as a quantum leap by Petro Georgiou are over -- it's a quantum backflip, 10 months later and one canoe later."
On Christmas Island, where 43 Papuans were held until their claim for aslyum was processed -- with visas granted to 42 -- families stayed in accommodation outside the detention centre.
The row came as a protester was arrested when more than 100 refugee activists clashed with police yesterday outside Kirribilli House, John Howard's Sydney home.
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The Uniting Church attacked the Pacific Solution's extension as an act of moral abandonment.
But Labor has stumbled over its immigration policy amid confusion over the proposed coast guard.
Mr Burke said the coast guard would intercept boats but would not turn them back if people were claiming Australia as a country of first asylum. Kim Beazley has argued his coast guard would have stopped the Papuan situation from arising, suggesting the group would have been turned back.
Under Labor's policy asylum-seekers would still be sent to offshore processing centres if they fail to reach the mainland.
However, the party will formally oppose in parliament laws to extend the rules to all illegal arrivals who arrive in Australia by boat.
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