This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Australia will be asked to "share the burden" of asylum seekers with Indonesia, where detention centres are overcrowded with people stymied by the Abbott government's hardline border policy.



Australia and Indonesia will meet on the sidelines of a workshop on the protection of asylum seekers in Jakarta next week.

Indonesia's director general for multilateral affairs, Hasan Kleib, will encourage Australia to "work together again" on the issue.

He says seven asylum seeker boats have been turned back since December – three of them using orange lifeboats.

Kleib says he understands Australia has opted for a "zero entry" policy, but it is "touching on other issues that relate to us".

There are now at least 10,623 asylum seekers and refugees in Indonesia who face years of waiting for resettlement, and who are vulnerable to people smugglers in the meantime.

"They go there in the middle of the sea, are caught by Australia, pushed back to us and become the burden of us again," Kleib told reporters in Jakarta on Thursday.

"So we want to share the burden ... It's what I've said since the beginning, people smuggling is under the category of transnational organised crime. If it is transnational, then there is no one country in the world that can handle it alone."

The workshop will also be attended by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which has seen its caseload in Indonesia balloon from less than 400 at the end of 2009 to more than 10,000 today.

Its representative in Indonesia, Manuel Jordao, echoed the view that "responsibility-sharing" was needed.

"A certain degree of ... responsibility-sharing should be negotiated if states want to actively put in place a system that should effectively manage migration in the region," he said.

Jordao said it would be a few more months before he could properly gauge how Operation Sovereign Borders had changed asylum seeker movements.

But an effect he called the "50% no-show rate" – where 50% of asylum seekers who registered with the UNHCR in Indonesia would disappear within six months – had vanished.

"Now, every single person who registers with the UNHCR stays," he said.

Between September 2013 and 31 January 2014, 360 people were accepted for resettlement, most of them by Australia.

Jordao rejected criticism that the process was too slow. "A fair process is not a speedy process," he said.