More funds to fight people smuggling VIDEO: More funds to fight people smuggling The govt will give Indonesia a $25m package to help fight people smuggling, as another 66 were detained.
EAST Timor's leader advises Julia Gillard not to call him about asylum-seeker plan until idea fully formed.
Prime Minister Gusmao said he was currently "very busy" with other government business and that he had asked President Jose Ramos-Horta to continue discussions with Ms Gillard and report back to him when the plan was more mature, The Australian reported.
But Mr Gusmao gave conditional support to the proposal for asylum-seekers to be processed at a regional centre based in East Timor.
He said he had "open mind" on the proposal, but warned that he would need to see the detail of Ms Gillard's proposal. Even then, he said at a press conference in Dili, the plan would require extensive investigation by his government and lengthy debate in the parliament before the measure could proceed.
Ms Gillard has been accused of failing to properly consult East Timor about her boatpeople plan, with Tony Abbott saying it showed that amateurs were running the country.
Ms Gillard should have known to deal with East Timor's prime minister, not its president, who holds no executive role, the opposition leader said.
"The fact she did not know this and did not think to ask this demonstrates that frankly we have amateurs running the Australian government," he said.
But Mr Gusmao denied being offended by Ms Gillard's diplomatic gaffe.
Ms Gillard has admitted she's yet to speak to East Timorese Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao about her proposal to send asylum seekers to a regional processing centre she wants built there.
She said she will speak to Mr Gusmao in coming days, after talks with President Jose Ramos-Horta indicated he was open to discussions about the plan.
But Mr Gusmao's deputy Jose Luis Guterres has already said East Timor was "very unlikely" to agree to Ms Gillard's plan announced earlier this week.
Across the Tasman New Zealand's refugee council has warned that the country should steer clear of backing Australia's proposed regional processing centre.
The New Zealand Refugee Council (NZRC) said Australia had different "asylum issues which are presently bound up in domestic politics related to their own upcoming elections".
The NZRC said it didn't think Gillard's proposal to return to Howard era offshore detention centres was a good solution given the "appalling conditions in existing Australian asylum detention centres".
"No New Zealand taxpayer funding should be applied to supporting a regional transitional camp in East Timor," a statement from the council said.
Ms Gillard said regional talks on the boat people issue had for some time included discussions about a regional processing centre.
"This is an idea for a regional processing centre that has been raised and considered for some time," she said.
"What's new is my determination to relentlessly pursue it."
She said Australia was not the only country in the region grappling with the problem of illegal boat arrivals.
"Our officials will now work in the region, with our regional neighbours, to get their views," she said.
Ms Gillard said she had recently spoken about the issue of boat arrivals with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and New Zealand Prime Minister John Key.
"It's a problem in our region and it's appropriate that we work across the region," she said.
East Timor experts have warned that Mr Gusmao has been making strong anti-Australian remarks recently and was likely to extract a high price for his compliance towards Ms Gillard's proposal.
The Telegraph said that Mr Gusmao was still smarting over the Woodside company's decision not to pipe oil and gas from the Timor Sea onshore to Dili, which he believes has cost East Timor hundreds of jobs.
Mr Guterres said yesterday that his country had previously rejected a similar request from former foreign minister Alexander Downer and was still "not in a condition to accept a detention centre".
"It's very unlikely East Timor will accept the proposal," he told The Sydney Morning Herald.
Taken aback
Mr Gusmao's Australian wife, Kirsty Sword, who is visiting Sydney, has expressed her scepticism.
"I must say I was taken aback when I first heard about it," she told the Herald.
"Timor has so many urgent problems in health, education and infrastructure I am not sure it should be distracted by this issue."
Ms Gillard yesterday pledged $25 million to fund a crackdown on people-smuggling across the region, including patrol boats and surveillance planes to help Jakarta's efforts during a discussion with President Yudhoyono.
She said that thousands of Australia-bound asylum seekers in Indonesia could be moved to the processing centre in East Timor if it were built.
Crackdown
Many of the asylum-seekers in the Indonesian camps are young Muslim men and concerns have already been raised about the impact of moving them to largely Catholic East Timor and finding them jobs in a tiny nation that has an unemployment rate of about 40 per cent.
The announcement of additional resources for the regional crackdown came as another boatload of asylum-seekers was intercepted in waters off Australia's northwest.
The boat, with 43 passengers and three crew, took the number of boatpeople arriving in Australia this year to 3575 on 76 separate vessels.
Former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser, a trenchant critic of John Howard's Pacific Solution, yesterday gave the new plan his provisional approval.
"If the Prime Minister can establish this policy and as a consequence remove the incentive to undertake a voyage in dangerous boats under the charge of the people-smugglers, then that's, I believe, a positive result and quite different from a Pacific Solution," he said.
However, Mr Downer, who helped implement the Pacific Solution, predicted the Prime Minister's "new" plan would fail.
"We were pretty desperate"
Mr Downer said Australia approached East Timor, Fiji and Singapore in 2001, before brokering a deal with Nauru to take more than 400 boatpeople rescued by the freighter Tampa.
"We were pretty desperate," the former foreign minister told The Australian.
"I mean there was Howard yelling at me, telling me to find somewhere to send these people. And I'm ringing up Ramos-Horta and I'm ringing up the foreign minister of Singapore and I'm ringing everybody, and they're all saying no."
Ms Gillard distanced her Timor proposal from the Pacific Solution.
"The difference here is we are not acting unilaterally, and we are not doing something quickly for political effect the way the Pacific Solution was done," she said.
But Tony Abbott rejected the plan as a "pre-election pose".
"How can something that was supposedly immoral when done by John Howard be a stroke of political genius when done by Julia Gillard?" Mr Abbott said.
Read more on this story at The Australian.
With AAP and The Australian
East Timor's leader, , has advised Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard not to contact him about  until a fully formed plan has been established.

Prime minister Gusamo claims he is preoccupied with other government matters and has asked , East Timor's president, to continue deliberations on the issue with Gillard.

Gillard has proposed a regional processing approach center in East Timor to tackle the increasing numbers of Asylym seekers in the Oceanic Region, to which Gusamo has announced conditional support for by saying that he needed to see the details of the proposal before he could say for certain and would then need to be extensively reviewed in parliament.

Australian opposition leader, , has criticised Gillard for not correctly involving East Timor in the proposal's development. This was in light of Gillard addressing the President of East Timor and not the prime minister directly, assuming the president holds the executive powers of the country. This, however, is not the case with the government holding the executive powers.

“The fact she did not know this and did not think to ask this demonstrates that frankly we have amateurs running the Australian government,” Abbot claimed.

Prime minister Gusamo, however, was not offended by Gillard's gaffe.