From AAP

11feb02

VETERAN Labor backbencher Leo McLeay has called on his federal colleagues to back a policy to scrap Pacific island and outback detention camps for asylum-seekers.

Public opinion on the issue was moving towards people seeing the current Government policy was making fools of Australia, he said.

His comments come as Labor MPs today start thrashing out a new asylum seeker policy as they return to Canberra ahead of the first sitting of federal parliament in four months.

Mr McLeay, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, said Prime Minister John Howard had sprung his tough asylum seeker policy on Labor as a deliberate ploy to win the election late last year.

"I don't think we had much choice then. I really don't have a great criticism of where we went there," he told ABC radio.

"But now we've had a bit of time to reflect on this - and all of us know, or most of us at least know, that what the Government's doing is wrong.

"We've got to educate people to take them along with us."

He said he had written to his colleagues calling for a Labor policy which scrapped the Pacific solution of camps on Nauru and Papua New Guinea and which closed outback centres such as Woomera and Curtin.

It had not yet been proved Labor would lose votes by switching its policy, Mr McLeay said.

"There's no doubt that in the last election Howard played us off a break on this issue a bit," he said.

"But I think there is a change occurring in public opinion, as more and more people see how stupid this Pacific option is, that they know it's making a fool of us, when more and more of the horrific stories come out of the detention centres.

"We don't do these things to murderers."