From AAP

04feb02

DIVISIONS within Labor over the federal government's hardline asylum-seeker policy look set to erupt when shadow cabinet meets in country Victoria.

The government is also under fire on the matter with ACTU president Sharan Burrow warning Foreign Minister Alexander Downer was heading for a showdown with the United Nations over refugees.

Ms Burrow was among international union leaders who met UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson in New York.

"It is a shocking indictment on (Prime Minister) John Howard's government that Australia should be discussed in the company of nations like Colombia, Burma and Zimbabwe," Ms Burrow said.

"The high commissioner ... indicated that the meeting with Mr Downer this week would be both significant and difficult."

Meanwhile, Labor frontbencher Carmen Lawrence told a Perth rally on Sunday she was ashamed of the ALP's position and believed detaining asylum seekers was morally indefensible.

But her views clash with those of frontbench colleagues Mark Latham and Laurie Ferguson, who said asylum seekers released into the community would disappear.

Opposition Leader Simon Crean played down divisions, but they are likely to feature in shadow cabinet's deliberations in the Gippsland town of Churchill tomorrow.

Deputy opposition leader Jenny Macklin said Labor may have to place its support for mandatory detention at the top of its internal policy review.

"Obviously it's a serious political issue right now and so it will have greater urgency than other issues," she said.

NSW Premier Bob Carr weighed into the debate, urging federal Labor to support detention centres or lose control over asylum seekers.

"It's a fact of life ... you can end up with a subterranean population and economy of people who got here illegally and won't present when required," he said.

"I just caution federal Labor against moving away from a policy that federal Labor in the past has accepted as inevitable."

Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd said the cost of the Pacific solution - the processing of 1,550 asylum seekers in Papua New Guinea and Nauru - was hurting Australia's overseas aid budget.

"One of the things that the Howard government is contemplating is paying for part of the Pacific solution out of the previously existing aid budget," he said.

Mr Rudd said Australia was only contributing $17 million to Afghanistan's reconstruction which would actually stem the flow of asylum seekers.

"Yet we seem to be able ... to find $400 to $500 million to assist in the processing of only 1,500 asylum seekers," he said.

In a scathing report released today aid agency Oxfam-Community Aid Abroad also said the Pacific solution was bleeding aid funds.

Oxfam executive director Andrew Hewett said aid was supposed to focus on poverty alleviation and good governance, but was paying for things like Nauruan President Rene Harris's Australian hospital treatment.

But Mr Howard rejected the Oxfam report.

"It's not adding to regional instability. That is an absurd argument," he said from New York.

Mr Howard said PNG welcomed the economic flow-ons from the Pacific solution.

"This policy of ours will continue to be criticised by a number of international agencies. I understand that. I don't think that criticism is valid," he said.