Opposition to Australian PM grows amid ship crisis

Hopes that the Tampa refugee crisis may be coming to an end were dashed last night when the Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said it was unlikely that the 434 asylum-seekers on board the freighter off Christmas Island will be processed by the UN in East Timor.

Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister John Howard met with more opposition to his tough handling of the issue, with the major opposition party, Labor, firmly distancing itself from the government's handling of the issue despite having earlier rowed in behind Mr Howard.

Labor leader Mr Kim Beazley said while he welcomed the fact that the Howard government had looked to the UN for help this is a course of action that should have been explored at the outset. He accused Mr Howard of using the crisis to tap the anti-immigrant vote in Australia before the federal election later this year and said the Prime Minister was playing politics with the refugees' lives.

But Mr Howard insisted his iron-fisted course of action was the right one. "If we were to now announce after everything that has happened that we are going to take these people in, do you seriously think that we would have any chance of negotiating control arrangements with another country, with Indonesia? I don't believe so."

Mr Howard also rebuffed the call by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, for Australians to look into their hearts on the issue.

"Australians have looked into their hearts far more genuinely than many other countries," Mr Howard said. "I say to our critics: we are humane, we are a country that has looked into our heart. We have a long tradition of taking refugees and that tradition will be maintained. What we are saying though is that we are not going to take, unconditionally, people who arrive here illegally."

Earlier, it seemed the Australian government was about to reach a deal with the UN to process the refugees in East Timor. The UN is still in control of the territory which held its first general election on Thursday. Mr Downer said: "It's a little unlikely that would be done in East Timor, to tell you the truth, because East Timor has just had their elections and they've been through something of a very successful transition over the last few weeks.

"They really don't have a formal government in place - that's not likely to be appointed until around the 15th of September - so there are obviously some complications with East Timor."

Following Thursday's peaceful election, the UN estimates that up to 80,000 East Timorese who were displaced by the violence in the region two years ago will now return to their homes from squalid camps in West Timor. Most of these will be processed by the UN and the Australian government had hoped the UN could also process the 434 mainly Afghan refugees who have been stranded on the Tampa for seven days.

On Wednesday the New Zealand Prime Minister Ms Helen Clark said her country would consider taking some of the refugees.

Mr Downer said talks with Norway on a resolution to the crisis were progressing well.