QUESTION:
Prime Minister, what more, if anything, can you tell us about the debris off the West Australian coast?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, Karen, we had satellite imagery which indicated that there were two large objects in the Southern Ocean. We’re talking about an extraordinarily remote spot; about 3,000 kilometres south-west of Perth. So, it’s a remarkably isolated location in very deep and inaccessible ocean. Nevertheless, we are throwing all the resources we can at it. We’ll have as much maritime searching as we can and we’ve got six aircraft available for the job. HMAS Success, one of our major naval assets, is steaming for the area and I understand that some merchant ships have been diverted as well. So, we will do everything we humanly can to try to get to the bottom of this. We don’t know what that satellite saw until we can get a much better, much closer, look at it. But this is the first tangible breakthrough in what up until now has been an utterly baffling mystery, and…
QUESTION:
It’s obviously gone around the world, Prime Minister, and understandably there’s some nervousness that this may be another false lead. What made you so confident as to come out and state that this could possibly be as big as you think today?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, we do have pretty strong satellite imagery and obviously this is a very serious lead in the way that nothing else so far really has been. It’s very close to the predicted southern flight corridor and that, I suppose, reinforces our suspicion that, just maybe, this is the first tangible evidence of what might have happened.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, how important is the issue of asylum seekers during this trip?
PRIME MINISTER:
Look, PNG is a very important relationship for Australia. Papua New Guinea is our closest neighbour. It’s a very good friend and I’m very pleased and proud of the assistance that PNG has given to Australia in this whole issue of people smuggling and its prevention. Now, we are working very closely with PNG. We’ve got the Manus processing facility, as you know, but we’ll be talking to PNG over the next couple of days. I’ll certainly be talking to Prime Minister O’Neill about what we can do to swiftly get people out of the Manus camp and at least some resettled here in PNG as was agreed with Prime Minister Rudd about nine months ago.
[ends]