Still room on Christmas Island: Rudd

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has denied Australia's offshore immigration facility at
Christmas Island is packed, even though it has surpassed its official capacity.
A Department of Immigration spokesman told AAP on Saturday there were 2067 people in
the detention centre.
The department has previously quoted its capacity as 2040.
The spokesman said he had no information about any possible transfers to the
mainland this weekend, and there are yet more people on the way.
A boat carrying 79 passengers and four crew was intercepted on Friday, the 34th
asylum seeker boat to arrive this year.
But Mr Rudd said his advice on Saturday from the Department of Immigration was that
there was still room on the island.
"The advice I have received this morning is that capacity remains," he told
reporters in Canberra.
Mr Rudd defended his government's approach to asylum seekers, saying their numbers
would vary depending on global circumstances.
Migration levels were about the same under his government as they were under the
Howard government, he said.
"Australia's permanent migration flow ... when the Howard government came to office,
it was about 85,000 a year, when the Howard government left office, it was about
180,000 a year," Mr Rudd said.
"In the last two years that we've been in office, we've kept it at about that level,
and across all those years, the number of refugees accepted into Australia has been
about 13,000."
There are reports that people on Christmas Island are sleeping in rooms designed for
teaching English, and that the island's wastewater treatment plant is under strain.
Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said the facility was built with the
intention of accommodating just 400 people, but a "calamity of policy failure" had
it now at breaking point.
"We have had 102 boats arrive under the Rudd government, with the highest rate of
arrival on record this year," he told AAP.
"Christmas Island was never going to cope with that."
Mr Morrison blamed the situation on the erosion of the previous government's border
protection policy.
"Kevin Rudd inherited a solution and proceeded to create a problem," he said.
"He now has to deal with that problem, but he can't even admit he has one."