Thirty years after Australia gave its first boat people asylum, a key Vietnamese-community leader is urging the government to treat refugees more generously.
On the 26th of April, 1976, a boat landed in Darwin Harbour, carrying the first five of two thousand Vietnamese refugees who came the same way.
Phong Nguyen, from the Victorian branch of the group calling itself the Vietnamese Community in Australia, was among 90,000 who came by plane by the mid-1980s.
Mr Nguyen says many Vietnamese risked their lives to escape and others that have followed deserve the same welcome.
"No people would leave their homeland, leave everything, risking a serious, serious risk of their lives and their children on these perilous journeys, nobody would step into boats that are unseaworthy -- nobody -- unless they're so desperate. In that sense, I feel for the refugees. Thirty years on, I'm very saddened to see people starting to interpret refugees as something else."