The United Nations' High Commission for Refugees has told Four Corners that Australia has committed to a 900 per cent increase in the number of refugees it officially resettles from Indonesia each year.

The unpublicised move is a big shift from Australia's average annual intake of about 50 Indonesian-based refugees.

"There was a recent decision taken by Canberra to upgrade the resettlement quota ... from little more than 50 cases or persons per year, to 500," Manuel Jordao, the UNHCR's senior representative in Indonesia, said.

"So that's a very significant increase."

Some refugee advocates have argued that Australia's previous small intake of refugees from Indonesia has meant long waits for resettlement and helped fuel demand for black market boats.

Mr Jordao's revelation appears in a Four Corners report which airs damning evidence showing Australia's costly efforts to stop people smuggling are being undermined by smugglers' links to corrupt Indonesian officials.

The investigation reveals how corruption in Indonesia's immigration detention centres feeds into smugglers' pockets, as detained asylum seekers are released in return for bribes to immigration officials, then channelled to smugglers who sell them passage on a boat to Australia.

Indonesia's foreign minister Marty Natalegawa suggests Indonesia is reluctant to house the growing numbers of asylum-seekers in its detention centres, which are partly funded by Australia.

"Short of Australia being able, being willing to have such facilities [on] its own soil, which apparently [it is] not, then I guess the next best thing is to be seen to be in a joint endeavour to have such facilities built," he said.

Corrupt officials

In tonight's Four Corners, hidden cameras capture six smugglers, their intermediaries and corrupt officials discussing boats, bribes and Australian border security.

"You can fix anything," says a military officer as he plans to release a batch of asylum-seekers from detention and send them by boat.

"I have people who are now on their third day at sea and a group who arrived [in Australia] a week ago," says one leading smuggler, who charges up to $US7,000 ($7,740) per passenger.

Competition is fierce among smugglers. One of them shoots a video of his boat as a marketing tool for passengers.

"Isn't it great? It's like a cafe isn't it," his wife says as she conducts the video tour.

This unprecedented footage is the product of the bravery and ingenuity of a refugee who worked with Four Corners and wore a hidden camera into numerous meetings with smugglers and their accomplices.

This man says asylum-seekers are used as "commodities" by the smugglers. He is on a mission to expose the smugglers and break their networks.

"I must destroy these bad people and the people behind them," he says.

Big business

Mr Jordao was blunt in his assessment of the smuggling trade in Indonesia, which he describes as a "big business".

"It will be a problem that will never go away," he said.

"But we believe that there is a way of, through a regional understanding, that states could [to] a great extent replace the activity of smugglers by offering people a number of possibilities for them to organise their lives and futures."

Australia's Department of Immigration declined to confirm how many of the 3,000 UN-registered refugees in Indonesia will be resettled this year, but said the humanitarian program is flexible to "respond to emerging humanitarian situations".

-Watch Four Corners on ABC1 tonight at 8:30pm