Greens 'compassionate' plan to stop boats

THE Australian Greens believe their "compassionate" plan to boost Australia's humanitarian intake will stop asylum seeker boats.

The party's leader Christine Milne says it's time for Australia to do what's right in the vexed policy area and provide safer options for would-be refugees.

"Deterrence has not worked," she told reporters in Canberra on Wednesday.

Her plan calls for processing centres on Nauru and Papua New Guinea's Manus Island to be closed and for Australia's humanitarian intake to be lifted to 30,000 from 20,000.

That would include an emergency intake of 10,000 people "from the region" who are classed as refugees by the United Nations.

Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said the plan risked turning Indonesia into a magnet for asylum seekers.

The Greens plan comes as the immigration department prepares to transfer the first group of asylum seekers to Papua New Guinea under Labor's tough border protection policy.

The group was due to arrive at PNG's Manus Island on Wednesday morning, but was delayed due to poor weather.

The department won't say when the transfer might occur but insists it wants it as soon as possible.

Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young was asked whether her party's plan to accept 10,000 approved asylum seekers from the region would discourage people from taking dangerous boat journeys.

"Let's try the emergency intake of 10,000," she told ABC television.

"I think that will stop boats."

The Greens say their plan to raise Australia's humanitarian intake was costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office and works out to be cheaper than Labor's offshore processing policies.

The party says Labor's policies will cost $7.2 billion over four years while the Greens measures will cost $2.5 billion.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Opposition Leader Tony Abbott had questions to answer about how Mr Morrison funded his Nauru trip this week.

Mr Morrison used his trip to the tiny Pacific nation to announce coalition plans to build a new 2000-bed processing facility for asylum seeker boat arrivals.

He took an empty seat on an already scheduled flight chartered by Toll Group, which has been working on multi-million dollar government contracts to upgrade Australia's Nauru processing centre since late 2012.

Mr Morrison says he declared Toll's role on his parliamentary register of interests.

"It is not the first time we've had privately funded trips to Nauru," he told ABC radio.

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