Australia said on Sunday it would move some foreign boatpeople away from a crowded island detention centre and fly them to a military base on the mainland. Immigration Minister Chris Evans said the decision followed a recent decision to suspend visa processing for new Sri Lankan or Afghan asylum-seekers reaching Australia or its territorial waters.
Evans said an air force base in the country's west would eventually be used to house "single males", saying it "makes sense for the government to manage this group of asylum seekers in one secure location". Other male detainees were due to fly to another centre in the northern city of Darwin on Sunday, Evans said in a statement. He cited "congestion" on Christmas Island, an Australian possession in the Indian Ocean used as a processing centre for boatpeople.
It is a hot political issue in Australia, where an election is due later this year. The Labour government has been accused by the conservative opposition of fuelling an upsurge in arrivals through a soft policy on asylum-seekers. The Christmas Island detention centre has been stretched to capacity with recent reports of rising tension among the hundreds of detainees there.
The transfer to the mainland would not affect the detainees' legal status, Evans said. After coming to power in 2007, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd scrapped the so-called 'Pacific solution' of his conservative predecessor John Howard, under which boatpeople were initially detained outside Australia. Since then there has been an upsurge in the numbers of boats arriving.
Although the 'Pacific solution' was widely criticised, former prime minister Howard's 2001 election victory was widely attributed to his tough stance on asylum-seekers.