Australia immigration minister wants more refugees

SYDNEY — Australia's Immigration Minister Chris Bowen Saturday called for a lifting of the nation's annual refugee intake from 13,750 to 20,000 but said he still wanted asylum-seekers processed offshore.

The proposal won the support of the ruling Labor Party at its national conference in Sydney, but Bowen has said the target is aspirational while plans to send boatpeople to other countries have been blocked by the High Court.

"We have to tackle this with a soft heart and a hard head," Bowen told delegates.

Bowen said refugees were risking their lives on boat journeys between Australia and Indonesia, a perilous stretch which saw close to 50 people drown in a shipwreck off Christmas Island a year ago.

"There have inevitably been others that we simply don't know about," he said.

In a bid to deter people-smugglers, Canberra in May announced plans to send 800 boatpeople to Malaysia in exchange for accepting 4,000 of the Southeast Asian nation's registered refugees.

But the plan collapsed in August after Australia's High Court ruled offshore processing illegal.

Bowen has said he still wants to see a regional solution to the problem which in 2010 peaked when people-smugglers brought close to 7,000 asylum seekers on the dangerous boat journey to Australia.

The issue provoked debate Saturday, with some Labor delegates saying the Malaysia solution violated Australia's international obligations.

"Australia cannot contract out its legal obligations," backbencher Melissa Parke said.

But in backing Bowen, Home Affairs Minister Brendan O'Connor said people-smugglers were "not modern-day Oskar Schindlers" -- a reference to the German industrialist credited with saving Jews during WWII.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," he said.

"This is profiting from desperate people."

After the High Court blocked offshore processing, which was also slated to include Papua New Guinea, the government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard has taken on onshore processing and widened community detention.

Since the so-called Malaysia plan was scuppered, the number of boatpeople arriving in Australia has ballooned, with two more boats carrying close to 100 asylum seekers intercepted off Western Australia on Friday.

Two other boats carrying more than 200 asylum-seekers were intercepted on Thursday.

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