Western Australia leader offers to accept stranded asylum seekers

PanARMENIAN.Net - The premier of Western Australia state, a member of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's Liberal Party, has offered to accept refugees from Australian-funded detention centers amid growing concern about conditions for the 1,350 people held in the camps, Reuters reports.

Under Australian law, anyone intercepted trying to reach the country by boat is sent for processing to asylum seeker camps on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru or to Manus Island off Papua New Guinea. They are never eligible to be resettled in Australia.

Australia and Papua New Guinea said that they would close the Manus Island facility, but gave no timeline, and did not say where the people held there would be sent.

"We would certainly accommodate a number of them in Western Australia and we'd certainly support them as a state government," Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett told the Australian Broadcasting Corp on Wednesday night.

Barnett has taken a similar position in the past, and his stand demonstrated a rare public split in the conservative Liberal Party over the government's controversial detention policy.

A spokeswoman for New Zealand Prime Minister John Key on Thursday, August 18 said that an offer made in 2013 to accept 150 refugees, which Canberra has rebuffed, still stood.

Harsh conditions and reports of rampant abuse at the camps have drawn wide criticism at home and abroad. Australia says its hardline policy is needed to stop deaths at sea during the dangerous boat journey from Indonesia to Australia.