Up north, there's another boatpeople issue

Like many Australians who know Melanesians, I have some sympathy for these people. They usually adapt well to Australian life, are good humoured and are not afraid of hard work. PNG is so dysfunctional, however, that we would have millions of low-skilled and poorly educated people flooding in if they were allowed

For the welfare of the people, PNG should have continued under Australian administration. There was no indigenous push for independence but a big-noting Labor government led by Gough Whitlam pushed independence on them

FROM his dingy, overcrowded cell in Port Moresby's Boroko prison, Jonathan Baure is already plotting his next assault on Australia's border.

It has been 10 days since he stood on the shore of Daru Island, along the southeastern tip of Papua New Guinea, to see off 16 dinghies, carrying 119 PNG nationals - including 13 children - headed across the Torres Strait to reclaim their "birth right" of Australian citizenship. Baure, a former tile salesman, had planned and openly promoted the voyage for weeks.

There was no shortage of willing passengers. Despite November's cholera outbreak on Daru, which killed 32 people, more than 400 supporters from all over the country flooded the island, paying Baure to join the unwieldy flotilla of banana boats.

Leader of an emerging group of "Australian Papuans", Baure has for a decade waged a losing battle with Canberra to recognise that people from the former Australian territory of Papua were not given the choice to remain Australian when PNG gained independence in 1975.


Two High Court cases have been lost in Australia over the issue, and Baure unsuccessfully launched his own case in PNG, which was thrown out in 2009.

Several months ago, Baure and his group, which claims to have 700 registered members, decided to take the fight to the Australian mainland. "I was born in Papua in 1967, before independence, and like many others, my birth certificate is stamped 'Australian'," Baure tells The Weekend Australian after his arrest on fraud and immigration charges this week. "Nobody has listened to us, so our plan was to go to Australia, get arrested, raise awareness of the issue and have our cases heard in the courts like the asylum-seekers. We knew they couldn't stop us."

He was right. On December 22, as the boats were about to leave, Australian and PNG customs and immigration officials rushed to Daru, alerted by the influx of people who had emptied the local shops of diesel and other supplies.

One Australian official from the high commission in Port Moresby pleaded with Baure and his supporters, warning they would be flown back to Daru without seeing the inside of a courtroom and the boats - the source of income for scores of families - confiscated.

Undeterred, Baure, who stayed behind to "handle the media", and the authorities then watched as the packed boats disappeared over the horizon. Within hours, the vulnerability of Australia's northern borders was exposed again.

Last year, Torres Strait councils told a Senate inquiry PNG nationals were pouring onto the islands to live, flouting immigration laws, running drugs and overwhelming health services in the region.

Despite a customs helicopter and patrol boat shadowing and then intercepting Baure's flotilla, one of the boats seemingly landed undetected on the tip of Cape York. At one stage, the customs vessel came alongside the lead boat, with the commander inviting Baure's offsider Laura Rea onboard to take a phone call from one of Immigration's most senior officials. "It was somewhere near Zagai Island (about 100km south of Daru), and the man on the telephone said we had no claim, that our case had already been lost in the High Court years ago," Rea tells The Weekend Australian. "He said that unless we turned back, we would lose our boats and be sent back immediately, but everyone wanted to go on."

Darkness started to fall and the boats were tied up to the Customs vessel, with the children brought aboard as the rest of the party slept on the dinghies. The next day, they were led to Horn Island, off the northern tip of Cape York, where they were detained before being flown back to Daru last weekend on a chartered plane.

Australian Immigration spokesman Sandi Logan said the incident could end up costing taxpayers $500,000. Logan says many of the passengers were not born before 1975, and could not qualify under even the criteria of the group's claims to citizenship.

"Customs, Queensland police, doctors and immigration were all involved when many of them were preparing for the floods and they had to deal with this prank, this protest."

The voyage has also come at a great cost to the passengers. Rea says the boat owners are devastated their vessels have been confiscated despite being warned before they left that it would happen.

She claims Immigration officials later assured the group on Horn Island their boats would be returned. "But Australia has confiscated their banana boats, and that is devastating to them and the families they support," she said.

Baure is facing up to three years' in jail, after being arrested in Daru as the passengers were being flown back. PNG police allege the 400 people who travelled to Daru had paid a minimum 200 kina ($77) to Baure for membership of his group and a document that purported to prove each of their claims for Australian citizenship.

Baure has been charged under section 96 of PNG's criminal code, relating to "false assumption of authority", as well as offences under the Migration Act.

He denies duping anybody into believing they were guaranteed citizenship with the documents. "The documents that the police are calling a fake visa was actually just a pass so that the boat owners knew who was legitimately entitled to be on the boat," he says. "I wanted to raise money for the group but also make sure that drug runners and other people didn't slip onto the boats."

Baure says his arrest is an attempt to destroy his group and put an end to the simmering issue. "We are already making plans, there will be other boats.

"There are many people still on Daru wanting to make the voyage. They can confiscate our dinghies but we will come back with canoes and if they take them we will make more and return. This is a fight about our civil rights being denied, not all of us want to move to Australia and people shouldn't think there are going to be hordes of Papuans arriving to live off welfare. "I have the information that will win the case. Why is Australia so fearful of facing a bunch of uneducated Papuans in court?"

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