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Thursday, 11 April 2013 01:04 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Sixty-six asylum seekers have landed within the harbour limits of Geraldton in Western Australia, after telling rescuers they had spent 44 days at sea after leaving Sri Lanka.
Local reports said two local men testing a motor in a runabout came across the boat about 500 metres offshore on Tuesday.
Women, children, including babies, and young men were among those on board. A sign on the boat read, “We want go to New Zealand help us”.
It is understood the boat is the first to land in Western Australia in five years. Those on board will escape tough deterrent policies faced by most asylum seekers who only get as far as Australia’s far-flung territory of Christmas Island. Asylum seekers who arrive in Australian territories excised from the Migration Act, including Christmas Island, Cocos Island and Ashmore, face being sent to offshore processing centres, and are unable to lodge visa applications while they are in Australia.
But Federal Parliament is yet to pass legislation that would excise the mainland for migration purposes, in effect treating the mainland the same as its excised territories. Under current rules, officials must decide whether to offer refugee status to people who make asylum claims and arrive in Australia by air or sea within 90 days of receiving their protection visa applications.
Those who landed in excised territories like Christmas Island after 13 August are instead subject to the government’s “no advantage” rule, and face waiting up to five years for their claims to be processed.
The Department of Immigration said a processing team would arrive in Geraldton and detain the group, who would then be taken to Christmas Island’s detention facilities. Geraldton Inspector Dominic Wood said: “I don’t recall any getting this far down in recent times.”
A witness said the boat was seen drifting not far off the beach, close enough to see that it was overloaded with people. They said it looked “rickety”.
It is highly out of the ordinary for an asylum seeker boat to travel so far south. Most arrive near Christmas Island, thousands of kilometres north.
Geraldton is approximately 400 kilometres north of Perth.
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said the boat’s arrival showed the federal government’s tough border protection policies were not deterring people from making dangerous journeys by sea, and called on the government to urgently boost the number of refugees being settled in Australia. Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said the boat’s arrival was “not funny”. “It is not funny at all, and this demonstrates that the government’s border failures have got to the point that people think they can just turn up anywhere on our coast,” he said.
