"The mass protest of 350 Sri Lankan asylum seekers that has continued overnight in the Christmas Island detention centre can be directly traced back to the lowest political behaviour of all time by Prime Minister Kevin last year when he started a nasty period of political posturing, and when he started playing "refugee football" with the asylum seekers on the Oceanic Viking," WA human rights group Project SafeCom said this morning.

"As advocates have told Project SafeCom, Sri Lankans are so unhappy with delays in the processing of their claims, that one of the protest placards reads "Oceanic Viking 6 Weeks, Christmas Island 6 Months". Of course they are seeing, that when the political pressure is on, politicians can speed up the process, and that the time it takesthe annual number of migrants stands at about 150,000 to 180,000 per year.

"The opposition is in danger of making total idiots of themselves by continuing their attempts to set the clock back to the days of John Howard. It's time they start attacking the Prime Minister on where, how much, and how disturbingly, Australia is undermining the Refugee Convention in the treatment of boat arrivals and in the excision of 4600 islands from the migration zone and from the full reach of that Refugee Convention," Mr Smit concluded.