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Australia - Source: ONE News -
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Australia faces a wave of asylum seekers amid the global financial crisis, opposition lawmakers said on Thursday following the arrival of three boatloads of illegal immigrants in a week.
A boat carrying 38 asylum seekers arrived undetected on Christmas Island, between the Australian mainland and Indonesia, slipping past a naval patrol vessel in darkness and tieing up at an island wharf in front of local people.
Australia was being targeted as the global economy weakened and following the centre-left government's decision last year to soften border protection measures, conservative opposition lawmaker Sharman Stone said.
"In the previous years under the (conservative) policies we had virtually brought people-smuggling to a halt, very few boats, only two and three a year, from of course the shocking days in 1999, 2000, 2001 when we had literally thousands of people coming down," Stone said.
The Indonesian-flagged wooden vessel was the third vessel to arrive in Australia this week and the fifth this year as part of what Indonesian authorities have said is a 5% increase in people smuggling since the global downturn began last year.
A fishing boat with 45 people on board landed on a remote Australian island on Wednesday, while 63 others were picked up by a navy vessel last Thursday, bringing the number intercepted since January to around 230.
There have been 12 boats landing in Australian waters since Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's government softened Canberra's treatment of refugees last July. Another vessel was said to be at sea on its way south from Indonesia.
People-smuggling to Australia peaked in 2001 when more than 1,200 people arrived, mostly from the Middle East and organised by professional people-smuggling rings.
Former Prime Minister John Howard, ousted by Rudd in a 2007 election, sent commandos in 2001 onto a freighter at sea to block illegal immigrants, splitting the nation between critics and supporters.
Howard set up the so-called "Pacific Solution" that included sending the navy to blockade Australia's northern coast and processing asylum seekers in small Pacific island countries, prompting condemnation by the United Nations and rights groups.
Stone and fellow conservative lawmaker Susan Ley said Rudd's reversal of Howard's hardline approach threatened a fresh boat influx, at odds with the government's recent decision to drastically scale back legal immigration.
Immigration advocates said there had been a 12% increase worldwide in asylum seeker numbers during 2008, and Australia was seeing only a fraction of that, with numbers last year up from 3,970 in 2007 to 4,750.
In comparison, nearly 30,000 boat people arrived on Italian shores over that period, while 19,900 landed in 2007.
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