Fury over asylum seeker boat that landed on the Australian mainland: ‘There’s been a catastrophic failure here’
Peter Dutton has called the arrival of a boatload of 12 people in rural Australia a “catastrophic failure” in a hammer attack on the government’s response to asylum seekers.
A new political storm is brewing over how a boatload of people arrived ‘undetected’ on the Australian mainland, with the Coalition putting pressure on the Labor government to explain how a group of people in a remote part of the Western Australian coast landed.
The group, believed to be mainly men, was first spotted at the remote Mungalalu-Truscott airbase in the Kimberley region earlier this week.
‘There has been a catastrophic failure here. People are intercepted and turned at sea and this is the tenth such venture. The public isn’t hearing much about it at the moment, but this is the first to make landfall and it should give Australians a lot of reasons to be concerned,” Dutton told 2GB on Friday.
The group was detected near Mungalalu-Truscott air base in the remote Kimberley region
It is not yet known whether the group are fishermen or asylum seekers and how long they had been in the country before they were discovered.
The opposition leader linked the arrival to a recent Supreme Court ruling, which ruled that indefinite detention without the prospect of deportation was unlawful, leading to the release of dozens of asylum seekers into the community.
He shifted the blame to Labor for what he called a “hasty” legislative response to the ruling which he said would encourage an increase in illegal boat arrivals.
‘It is an attraction for these people smugglers who sell their goods again. Unfortunately, this has tragically caused people to drown at sea. You don’t know who is coming into our country.’
Education Minister Jason Clare previously warned against conflating the High Court ruling and the boat arrival incident, arguing these are ‘two separate cases’.
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“An investigation is ongoing, we do not comment on operational matters,” he told Channel 7.
‘If people want to come to Australia by boat, the boat is turned back, people return to their country of origin, or they settle in a third country. That was the position of the previous government, and the same was true of our government.”
WA Police made inquiries with the Australian Border Force, which declined to provide details of the transfer plans. The Guardian has reported that the group will be taken to Nauru by Border Police.
Home Secretary Clare O’Neil has also been contacted for comment.