Fears of asylum seeker influx as people-smugglers adapt

Border Force has learned asylum-seekers found in WA were ordered to wait in the bush for days as the smugglers sailed out of Australian waters.

A group of asylum seekers were discovered on the remote Dampier Peninsula north of Broome on Saturday afternoon.

Australian Border Force fears people-smugglers are investing in faster and more modern boats than ever before, after learning two groups of asylum-seekers found on the far north coast of Western Australia last week had been ordered to wait in the bush for days while the smugglers sailed out of Australian waters.

Some of the 39 men – all of them from Pakistan, Bangladesh or India – told Aboriginal people on the Dampier Peninsula north of Broome that they came to Australia because they wanted to go to Sydney to work and send money home to their families. The entire group was at the South Pacific processing centre of Nauru on Sunday, where they join the 12 unauthorised maritime arrivals who were dropped off on a stretch of the Kimberley coast in November.

The boat that delivered that group three months ago was also never found, and is assumed to have long gone two days later when the asylum-seekers walked into Truscott air base and asked for help. The Australian has been told there is a belief among border force officials that smugglers may have abandoned their practice of sailing vessels directly to Christmas Island or into the path of navy or border force vessels.

This is because, after more than 10 years of Operation Sovereign Borders and advertising campaigns by Australian governments, it is well known that asylum-seekers intercepted at sea are no longer settled in Australia. Smugglers also lose their boats because authorities seize them.

There are now concerns that naive and aspirational men are being sold the lie that if they reach the Australian mainland, they will be allowed to stay. And smugglers who believe they can “drop and run” may be investing in better boats capable of more journeys.

Speaking ahead of arriving in WA for a cabinet meeting on Monday, Anthony Albanese accused Peter Dutton of playing politics with the issue of border security. “We’re very confident that Operation Sovereign Borders remains in place. We are implementing the policies that we said we would before the election. And this is just the latest demonstration of it,” he said.

“And that is why the Commander … also made very strong comments about the responsibility that people have in public life to not send the wrong message to the people smugglers.”

The Opposition Leader, who oversaw Operation Sovereign Borders for three Liberal prime ministers, accused Labor of not supporting the highly-effective policy at the weekend.

“The government needs to be honest and frank and open in relation to this issue,” Mr Dutton said, before launching his party’s campaign for the Dunkley by-election next month. “We don’t know whether it’s one or two boats that have arrived. The Prime Minister himself wasn’t aware, so how can two boats get to the Australian mainland without being detected if the same settings were in place that we had under the Coalition in Operation Sovereign Borders?”

On the Dampier Peninsula on the weekend, Aboriginal people discovered the probable landing site of the boat on which some or all of the 39 asylum-seekers arrived last week. A short distance away in bushes were bags of clothes, empty water bottles and other signs of a camp including opened and emptied packets of Beng Beng, a crispy wafer snack popular in Indonesia and Date Crown dates distributed from the United Arab Emirates.

“They (the men found on the Dampier Peninsula on Friday) said they had been in the jungle for four days since they got off the boat. They said jungle but they meant the Australian bush,” one source familiar with events told The Australian.

“There is no way they were wandering in that heat lost for four days. They were camped.”

Aboriginal people who live on the Dampier Peninsula north of Broome used their tracking skills and a drone to piece together what happened and have given this information to Australian Border Force. At about 10am on Friday, border force and police rushed to the remote Aboriginal community of Beagle Bay, 128km north of Broome, where 26 asylum-seeker men from Pakistan and Bangladesh were being cared for by locals.

Authorities were apparently unaware other asylum-seekers were in the region unaccounted for until later that afternoon.

At about 3.15pm on Friday, 12 men from Bangladesh and one from India arrived at Pender Bay tourist camp. The owner convinced them not to retreat back into the bush. He and others fed the men and treated their wounds, and encouraged them to turn themselves into police.

Police arrived about 5.45pm to collect that second group from Pender Bay. The group at Pender Bay appeared to have no knowledge of the group at Beagle Bay, fuelling speculation more than one smuggling venture had reached the coast. The Australian has been told the government believes the two groups arrived on one vessel.