SYDNEY—Australia's lower house Wednesday passed a bill to allow boatpeople to be sent offshore for processing as refugees, moving a step further towards asylum-seekers being transferred to Malaysia or Nauru.
The bill, which sparked angry and emotional debate, passed the House of Representatives by 74 to 72 but is considered unlikely to pass the Senate when the Labor government brings it to the upper house on Thursday.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard supported a private members bill from independent MP Rob Oakeshott to help revive the deal clinched last year to send 800 boatpeople to Malaysia in exchange for 4,000 of that country's refugees.
The bill, aimed at deterring people-smugglers from the dangerous maritime voyage to Australia, would allow an immigration minister to designate any nation as an "offshore assessment country" if it was party to the Bali Process.
The Bali Process is a regional cooperative framework for dealing with asylum-seekers involving more than 40 countries.
The bill passed with an amendment which places a sunset clause on it, meaning it would be reviewed after 12 months.
Parliamentarians engaged in hours of debate on the topic as an asylum-seeker emergency unfolded off the remote Australian territory of Christmas Island where a crowded boat sank Wednesday, leaving at least one person dead.
Rescuers saved 125 people from where the ship capsized, some 107 nautical miles north of Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, but authorities said there were up to 150 people onboard.
The accident comes barely a week after another vessel went down in the same area, leaving as many as 90 people estimated to have drowned.
Australia's Labor government and their conservative opponents have been at loggerheads over boatpeople, with the opposition against the plan to send asylum-seekers to Malaysia which is not a signatory to UN refugee conventions.
Gillard offered, as a compromise, to re-open a detention centre on Nauru while pressing ahead with her Malaysia deal if the opposition agreed to vote for the Oakeshott bill but this was rejected.
The vote was won with the help of independent MPs. The Malaysia plan was aimed at stopping the flow of hundreds of people, mostly from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, coming by boat from Asian hubs each year in the hope of being resettled in Australia.-Interaksyon (June 27, 2012 7:00PM)
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