Australia seeks to ally fears Trump could nix deal

AUSTRALIAN Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull sought to allay concerns yesterday that a deal to send refugees from remote Pacific camps to the United States could be scuppered by presidentelect Donald Trump.

Canberra on Sunday announced a “one-off” arrangement that would see an unspecified number of the 1,600 boatpeople held in offshore processing centres on Nauru and in Papua New Guinea settled in the US.

But with the political novice, who campaigned to ban Muslim migration, due to take office on January 20, the head of a prominent US anti-immigration think-tank warned: “This is the kind of thing the Trump administration will nix on Day 1.”

“I don’t expect any Republicans will defend it. I can’t see a lot of Democrats defending it either,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Centre for Immigration Studies, told the Sydney Morning Herald.

“My sense is that when the word gets out on this, it’ll be dead on arrival.”

Canberra sends asylum seekers who try to reach Australia by boat to detention facilities on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island and Nauru. They are blocked from resettling in Australia even if found to be refugees.

While Turnbull spoke to Trump by phone soon after the shock election win last week, he said he did not bring up the refugee issue.

“Until January 20 when Donald Trump is inaugurated, the president is Barack Obama, and we deal with one administration at a time,” he told Channel Nine. “And you don’t discuss confidential matters with one administration with a future administration.”

Asked if he was confident a president who wants to put up a wall between Mexico and the US to keep people out would honour the commitment, Turnbull was non-committal.

“We have a very long history of cooperation with the United States where we, in matters of this kind, are able to pursue our mutual and our respective humanitarian and national security objectives,” he said.

He added that those granted resettlement would be part of Washington’s annual refugee quota and “they are simply managing the mix of their refugee intake just as we are”.