Asylum seekers flown to Nauru after landing on WA coast

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A dozen asylum seekers have been taken to Nauru after arriving by boat on a remote stretch of West Australian coastline earlier this week.

Apprehended on Wednesday after their boat landed at a barge mooring in the Kimberley region, the 12 people were briefly housed at the Truscott airbase before being flown to the South Pacific island’s detention centre by Australian Border Force.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil has accused Opposition Leader Peter Dutton of politicising the arrival of a boat in Western Australia.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil has accused Opposition Leader Peter Dutton of exploiting the undetected arrival after he linked the appearance of the vessel to people smuggling.

O’Neil said the government was “careful and deliberate” about how it discussed national security issues, including operational matters.

“No political objective should ever come before the security of our country and the integrity of the operations and agencies that protect us every day,” she said in a statement.

According to sources, the boat’s passengers were apprehended by Border Force on Wednesday.

The confirmation of the unexpected arrival on the mainland follows a challenging fortnight for the government, which has been scrambling to deal with the release of more than 100 former immigration detainees, including convicted murderers and rapists, after a High Court ruling.

Speaking at a press conference in Strathphine in Queensland on Friday, Dutton urged the government to provide more information about the latest arrivals.

“We need to know the status of these people; whether or not they’ve sought protection, where it is they’ve come from – some of the public open-source reporting at the moment is that they’ve come out of Indonesia,” Dutton said.

“At the moment, Australians see this prime minister as weak and so do the people smugglers. The people smugglers see Anthony Albanese as a soft touch because he is a soft touch.”

O’Neil refused to provide any information, saying only: “Whether it’s the conflict in the Middle East, tensions at home, Operation Sovereign Borders or even the highly sensitive security operations involved in individuals returning from conflict, there’s nothing Peter Dutton won’t use for his own political ends.”

Informed of the High Court’s decision – which overturned a decades-old regime of indefinite immigration detention for foreigners who could not be deported – and this week’s boat arrival by this masthead, the Indonesian police chief in charge of the island nearest to Australia said news of the detainees’ release would embolden people smugglers.

“The people smuggling perpetrators will be happier and get more active finding potential victims,” said Senior Commissioner Mardiono, chief of police of Rote Ndao regency in East Nusa Tenggara province. “And the closest place to Australia is Rote.”

It was from Rote Island, 500 kilometres off the coast of Western Australia, that 13 Iraqi nationals attempted to travel to Australia last December before being intercepted at Ashmore Reef.

A month later, six Indians and four Indonesians were sent back to Rote after also being stopped in Australian waters.

Mardiono, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, said he had not been aware of this week’s landing of a boat from Indonesia in WA.

“I have been in Rote for the past four months,” he said. “I have not found or received [any] fresh report about people smuggling cases.”

Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson said this week’s group was “the first unlawful arrivals to reach the Australian mainland in a decade”.

“The Albanese government must explain this serious and concerning border protection failure, and immediately restore the funding they cut from Border Force operations,” he said.

“Our maritime surveillance must also be urgently boosted to make sure there are no more incursions like these again.”

The arrivals will join 11 other people who were taken to Nauru in September after being intercepted off Australia that month.

Home Affairs officials revealed during a parliamentary hearing last month that Australia was again using the offshore immigration detention centre, but would not say where the detainees came from, prompting accusations of secrecy from Greens and Liberal politicians.

An illegal fishing boat destroyed by Australian Border Force in 2021. Credit: Ausralia Border Force

In February, O’Neil was accused by crossbench MPs of trying to thwart transparency over offshore detention arrangements after urgently pushing through legislation to renew Nauru as an immigration detention location with less than 24 hours’ notice.

Earlier this year, it was revealed that it cost $350 million a year for the government to keep the facility open as a deterrent.

The island’s regional processing facility was first opened in 2001 by the Howard government, suspended in 2008 by the Rudd government, but reopened by the Gillard government in August 2012 to tackle a surge in boat arrivals.

The offshore site has recently been plagued by scandal, with O’Neil announcing an investigation into the integrity of government procurement contracts linked to immigration detention.

Appearing on Seven’s Sunrise program on Friday, Education Minister Jason Clare warned against conflating the boat arrival with the High Court decision.

“I just make the general point that if people seek to come to Australia by boat, the boat is either turned back or people are returned to their country of origin or they’re settled in a third country,” he said.

“That was the position under the former government; it’s the same position under this government.”

Border Force commissioner Michael Outram told a parliamentary hearing last month that contractors’ ability to recruit pilots had reduced aerial surveillance, while a reduction in maritime patrols was due to an ageing fleet and maintenance timeframes.

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