Australia strikes revolving-door asylum-seeker deal with Malaysia

May 7, 2011, 6:48 GMT

Sydney - Australia has agreed to take 4,000 asylum-seekers already in Malaysia in return for Kuala Lumpur taking 800 of those who reach Australia by sea each year.

The 4,000 asylum-seekers will be flown to Australia over the next four years, Prime Minister Julia Gillard said Saturday.

The dispatch of asylum-seekers to Malaysia from Australia for processing by the United Nations will begin when the bilateral agreement is signed, Gillard told reporters in Canberra.

She said those accepted by Australia for resettlement would be those who had been found to be genuine refugees by the UN and who were 'at the front of the queue' and had been in Malaysia for some time.

'If someone seeks to come to Australia, then they are at risk of going to Malaysia and going to the back of the queue,' Gillard said.

Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said Australia would fund the transfers, which would cost around 300 million Australian dollars (324 million US dollars) a year.

'If you are a people smuggler selling the product of guaranteed processing and settlement in Australia, you cannot do so,' Bowen said.

According to a statement released in Kuala Lumpur and quoted by national news agency Bernama, the intent of the arrangement was 'to undermine the business model of transnational criminal syndicates' that engage in people-smuggling.

Over 6,000 asylum-seekers, mostly from the Middle East, are in detention awaiting a decision on their visa applications. Most arrived by boat from Indonesia after using Malaysia as a transit point in their quest to get to Australia.

The few initially refused visas by the Gillard government usually get to stay after having their applications reviewed by an independent panel or by the courts.

Australia is also hoping to clinch a deal with Papua New Guinea to re-open the Australian-financed, UN-run offshore immigration processing centre on Manus Island that closed in 2004, as did a similar in the tiny Pacific nation of Nauru.

Negotiations with the government of Papua New Guinea Prime Minister Michael Somare began after East Timor refused to host a detention centre for Australia.

In prospect is a return to the processing visas in South Pacific countries that former prime minister John Howard credited with stopping the flow of boats.

After an upsurge in 2001 that saw more than 5,000 asylum-seekers arrive to fill mainland detention centres, Howard began shipping arrivals to PNG and Nauru where they could be processed under UN rules.

The UN's International Organisation for Migration has higher hurdles for asylum than Australia does.

The imposition of the Pacific Solution, which the Labor government ditched when it came to power in 2007, saw a drastic cut in arrivals.

Arrivals in the last three years have risen to an all-time record. Detention centres have been set alight by asylum-seekers angered at overcrowding and at delays in granting visas.

Gillard said she had run out of patience with asylum-seekers trashing and burning detention centres.

'I can understand why people have been angry seeing those disturbances; I've been angry seeing those disturbances at detention centres,' she said. 'This is happening in defiance of our laws and causing destruction of government property.'

The opposition Liberal Party has long called for the government to re-open the mothballed facility on Nauru and re-introduce Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs) that grant asylum-seekers temporary sanctuary until it is deemed safe for them to return to their homelands.

The Labor government, first led by current Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd and now by Gillard, stopped the issue of TPVs.

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