The Coalition's pledge to turn back asylum seekers' boats is illegal, costly and would expose Australian naval personnel to harm, formerly secret Customs advice says.
The advice also shows the Howard government's attempts to forcibly return boats often failed, and details how the policy had relied on assuming, without evidence, that Indonesia agreed with it.
The Australian Customs and Border Protection Service issued the documents under freedom of information law, though it censored many details for security reasons.
The briefs, which include Customs and the Defence Department's analysis of Opposition Leader Tony Abbott's policy, support growing calls for the Coalition to abandon its hardline stance against boat-borne asylum seekers.
In recent weeks, the United Nations and Indonesian police have attacked the Liberals' policy as dangerous and illegal. A former chief of the defence force, Admiral Chris Barrie, also warned Mr Abbott that naval officers would disobey illegal orders to tow refugees' boats back to Indonesia. ''Policy can't override international law and cannot tell a commanding officer what decisions he must make at sea at the time,'' he told ABC radio last month.
One of the Customs documents, written just before the 2010 election, analysed the Howard government's attempts to implement a ''turn-back'' policy from 2001.
It showed Customs and naval staff only tried to return 12 of the 173 vessels they intercepted, and fewer than half of those attempts resulted in the boats returning to Indonesian waters. In at least two cases, the interventions led to deaths, either through drownings or fires on-board the boats.
''There were very few benign or compliant boardings under the policy, and a pattern of objectionable and belligerent behaviour quickly became evident ... PIIs [potential irregular immigrants] frequently became hostile and occasionally inflicted self-harm,'' the brief says.
Another brief says Australia relied on a legal principle, the ''doctrine of acquiescence'', to return the asylum seekers, which assumed Indonesia agreed to accept them even though it hadn't.
''Even if there was consent to the vessel being 'turned back', Border Protection Command notes that when it boards these vessels, nearly all of the vessels are found in a poor condition and poorly maintained. It is therefore difficult in many situations to properly determine that the vessel would be seaworthy enough to allow the vessel to continue on without the loss of life.''
A separate paper says that, if a future government did secure Indonesia's agreement to accept the refugees' return, the navy would need extra warships and patrol boats to police a turn-back policy.
Shadow immigration minister Scott Morrison's spokesman said last night the Coalition would ''employ the same procedure to turn around boats where it is safe to do so, as when this policy was successfully implemented by the navy under the Howard government. There is no restriction on an Indonesian flagged vessel returning to Indonesian territorial waters.''
An Indonesian embassy spokesman denied yesterday it had a formal position on the Coalition's policy. However, one of the Customs briefs says the Indonesian government ''has already indicated it is unlikely to agree to the 'shuffling of vessels' between Australian and Indonesian waters because it does not address the issue of people-smuggling''.
.gif)
