PNG policy working despite more boats: Burke Refugees sit on the SIEV 358 asylum seeker boat after it capsized last year. Immigration Minister Tony Burke says the government's PNG resettlement policy is working, despite recent boat arrivals including one in which five people are believed to have drowned on Tuesday. "There is no doubt that it is having an impact," he told the ABC's Lateline program. Week on week there has been a trajectory downward [in the number of people arriving in Australia by boat]. In the month since the government announced its radical plan to resettle all people who arrive by boat, more than 2500 asylum seekers have arrived. Immigration Minister Tony Burke says the PNG resettlement policy is "having an impact" despite 2500 asylum seekers arriving since it was announced. A further 106 were rescued on Tuesday, after a vessel capsized near Christmas Island, with another five feared drowned. "Some of the smuggling operations have tried to put together a surge to overwhelm the system," Mr Burke said, while noting he had seen evidence that other asylum seekers were cancelling or delaying trips. Mr Burke also defended the workability of the asylum policy, saying that arrivals would continue to be sent to PNG for resettlement, even if numbers remained high. "We have an agreement that gets reviewed by Papua New Guinea and Australia after 12 months," he said. That agreement was seemingly cast into doubt after PNG's Prime Minister, Peter O'Neil, told Fairfax Media he had not agreed to settle all asylum seekers who are found to be refugees after processing and that Australia would need to take back a share of them. But Mr Burke suggested that the strain on PNG might be eased by an "increasingly significant" number of asylum seekers preparing to return home of their own accord, instead of resettling in PNG. He also said the government, if it were re-elected, would seek to broker agreements with countries other than PNG. The government announced a plan to extend resettlements to Nauru earlier this month. Tuesday's drownings began when the Australian Maritime Safety Authority received a request for help from a person on board the boat on Tuesday, about 120 nautical miles north of Christmas Island, in an area believed to be in Australian waters. But Mr Burke said the legal terrain for that challenge was different to when the High Court struck down its plan to process refugees in Malaysia in 2011. "After the Malaysia decision we changed the law for processing," he said. People have been processed under that new law. Tuesday's incident is the first reported boat crisis in Australian waters since Labor announced its new asylum seeker policy in late July.