Reuters/AFP/Geneva

The head of UN refugee agency UNHCR has said that he hopes common sense will prevail in Australia’s election-season debate about how the country treats asylum seekers.
“We are of course very much interested, not in the election itself, but in the debate about asylum policy in Australia,” said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres.
Opinion polls predict the government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Labor Party will be unseated by the conservative coalition led by Tony Abbot when Australians vote on September 7.
In a pitch to voters concerned about immigration, Abbott promised last week to revive laws barring thousands of asylum seekers already in Australia from settling there permanently.
“The debate about these questions, not only in Australia but in many other parts of the world, is unfortunately not always based only on realities. It’s based on perceptions, on prejudice, on other aspects,” Guterres told Reuters. “But we hope that in the end common sense will prevail.”
Abbott has said he would appoint a military commander to take charge of asylum issues in an operation dubbed “sovereign borders”, and would give the 30,000 asylum seekers in Australia only temporary protection visas if they were found to be refugees, meaning they could be sent to their home country in the future.
Australia had always been generous about resettling refugees and has one of the most successful programmes to integrate resettled refugees anywhere in the world, Guterres said.
“I hope ... Australia understands also the need to provide protection to those that seek protection in Australia,” he said.
On Friday, Abbott said that he would pay the Indonesians for unseaworthy boats to stop them ending up in the hands of people-smugglers.
Asylum-seekers arriving by usually rickety boats, often via transit hubs in Indonesia.
Abbott said that he would step up on-the-ground operations in Indonesia with a “community outreach” scheme aimed at disrupting people-smuggling rings.
The A$440mn ($397mn) scheme would include a capped government buy-back plan for the leaky fishing vessels as well as stipends for Indonesian “wardens” in 100 villages to provide information to Australia and bounty payments for information leading to successful smuggling prosecutions.
“The important thing is that we stop the boats,” Abbott told reporters in Darwin.
“It’s much better and much more sensible to spend a few thousand dollars in Indonesia than to spend A$12mn processing the people who ultimately arrive here,” he said, referring to the figure the opposition claims the government spends processing every boat that arrives.
Abbott refused to “put a figure on” how much he would be prepared to pay per boat and said allowances or bounties would be left to the discretion of “our people on the ground”.
He also pledged A$67mn to deploy specialist Australian police operatives in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Malaysia.
Abbott declined to comment on whether he had spoken to the Indonesian government about his plans, which were ridiculed as “crazy” and “bizarre” by Australia’s ruling Labor party.
“It is absolutely in Indonesia’s interest to stop the boats, I have no reason to think that the Indonesians won’t be prepared to work co-operatively and constructively with us,” he said.
Teuku Faizasyah, spokesman for Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, declined to comment on the buy-back plan.
“Abbott and Rudd are in the middle of campaigning, so I think it’s improper to comment on their political statements as it’s part of their efforts to win over voters,” he told AFP.
Immigration Minister Tony Burke rejected Abbott’s latest plans as “simply crazy policy” that would only benefit the Indonesian shipbuilding industry, with no way to buy boats as fast as they could be made.
“Of all the mad ideas I’ve heard in immigration, I think boat buy-back wins,” Burke said, adding that Indonesia had one of the largest fishing fleets in the world, with the majority of vessels “used by poor villagers to make a livelihood”.
“I think you can guarantee, absolutely guarantee, that the opposition never tested the boat buy-back policy with the Indonesians because the Indonesians know how big the fishing fleet is for their country,” said Burke. “I think it’s pretty patronising to our neighbours.”
Both major parties have pledged a crackdown on the issue – Rudd’s Labor government has signed an agreement with Papua New Guinea to banish boatpeople there for permanent resettlement even if found to have a valid refugee claim, effectively closing Australia’s borders to those arriving by boat.
Rudd’s government was recently rapped by a UN human rights watchdog for mistreating a group of 46 refugees, including 42 Tamils from Sri Lanka, after judging them to be a potential security risk.
A UN committee that monitors compliance with a major human rights treaty ruled in July that Australia must compensate, release and rehabilitate the refugees, according to a statement from the UN human rights office on Thursday.