Michael McKenna
FROM his dingy, overcrowded cell in Port Moresby’s Boroko prison, Jonathan Baure is already plotting his next assault on Australia’s border.
It has been 10 days since he stood on the shore of Daru Island, along the southeastern tip of Papua New Guinea, to see off 16 dinghies, carrying 119 PNG nationals – including 13 children – headed across the Torres Strait to reclaim their “birth right” of Australian citizenship.
Baure, a former tile salesman, had planned and openly promoted the voyage for weeks.
There was no shortage of willing passengers.
Despite November’s cholera outbreak on Daru, which killed 32 people, more than 400 supporters from all over the country flooded the island, paying Baure to join the unwieldy flotilla of banana boats.
Leader of an emerging group of “Australian Papuans”, Baure has for a decade waged a losing battle with Canberra to recognise that people from the former Australian territory of Papua were not given the choice to remain Australian when PNG gained independence in 1975.
Two High Court cases have been lost in Australia over the issue, and Baure unsuccessfully launched his own case in PNG, which was thrown out in 2009.
Several months ago, Baure and his group, which claims to have 700 registered members, decided to take the fight to the Australian mainland. “I was born in Papua in 1967, before independence, and like many others, my birth certificate is stamped ‘Australian’,” Baure tells The Weekend Australian after his arrest on fraud and immigration charges this week. “Nobody has listened to us, so our plan was to go to Australia, get arrested, raise awareness of the issue and have our cases heard in the courts like the asylum-seekers. We knew they couldn’t stop us.”
He was right.
On December 22, as the boats were about to leave, Australian and PNG customs and immigration officials rushed to Daru, alerted by the influx of people who had emptied the local shops of diesel and other supplies.
One Australian official from the high commission in Port Moresby pleaded with Baure and his supporters, warning they would be flown back to Daru without seeing the inside of a courtroom and the boats – the source of income for scores of families – confiscated.
Undeterred, Baure, who stayed behind to “handle the media”, and the authorities then watched as the packed boats disappeared over the horizon. Within hours, the vulnerability of Australia’s northern borders was again exposed.
Source: www. heraldsun.com.au
