Stephen Smith (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Of course, anyone with any familiarity with these issues would know that, when a request came from the Indonesian authorities to assist the vessel in the Indonesian search and rescue area, if Australia had acted, there may well have been immigration consequences to flow from that. Those consequences were not known conclusively at the time. They are not known now because the people onboard that vessel have not been the subject of the UNHCR procedures, and the Indonesian government has indicated they will be. But whether there were to be immigration, refugee or asylum seeker consequences or not, Australia had a moral, a humanitarian and a national interest obligation to discharge our duties to rescue people in distress at sea, and that is what we did.

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