CANBERRA: When is a part of Australia suddenly not part of Australia? Whenever it looks like a place that a boat load of asylum seekers might make landfall.

To avoid its obligations under international law to automatically accept the temporary refugee status of asylum seekers expected to land in the near future on a northern atoll or island in the near future, Australia’s federal government has decided to exclude over 3,500 islands and territories from the country’s so-called ‘migration zone’.

Although still remaining under Australian sovereignty, these islands will lose their status as being subject to Australian laws on migration. It is a very facile exercise and in theory could apply to Sydney.

The legal opportunity arose when the government realized that the migration laws defined where it could chose to exercise border control within its migration zone. The argument is that if a an illegal entrant arrives in a part of Australia not subject to migration control, they have not for the purposes of the law arrived in Australia, and are therefore not subject to the UN protocols on protection for persons claiming refugee status.

Not all of the islands and territory excluded from the migration zone are uninhabited. For example, Melville Island just a short flight from Darwin is a major aboriginal community. Also, the regulations defining the exclusion from the migration zone do not name each island, instead it consists of a table of latitudinal and longitudinal definitions of the areas subject to exclusion.

However, this exclusion policy has caused uproar in the national parliament. For the first time in the current boat people crisis the Labour opposition has split from its stance of unity with the conservative coalition of Prime Minister John Howard in jointly supporting the mandatory detention of illegal immigrants or their banishment to ‘holding camps’ in small Pacific states like Nauru.

The Howard government had been struggling in a general election campaign when it seized upon the political capital of the Tampa affair, refusing to allow the ship to disembark its human cargo onto Australian soil, where under international treaty, it would be obliged to grant them temporary refugee visas while their status was determined according to UN rules.

Instead nearly 1,000 boat people, mostly from the Tampa, were forcibly taken by the Royal Australian Navy to holding camps in Papua New Guinea and Nauru, with each government being promised massive cash payments for their trouble.—Dawn/The Observer News Service.