Ian Munro – Premier Steve Bracks has asked Prime Minister John Howard not to force 1700 asylum seekers to return to East Timor.

In a letter to the Prime Minister, Mr Bracks said many of the 1400 East Timorese in Melbourne had no homes to return to and did not want to revisit the scenes of trauma and destruction experienced during the Indonesian occupation.

Some of the East Timorese resettled in Australia arrived after the 1991 slaughter of students by Indonesian troops in Dili's Santa Cruz cemetery.

Mr Bracks' letter, sent on Friday, said many asylum seekers no longer had links with East Timor and had made a new life here. "Their children have been educated here, some were born here and others have married."

It said they should be given the choice of remaining to avoid "a potentially tragic outcome".

It called on the Federal Government to use powers under section 417 of the Migration Act to grant permanent residency on compassionate grounds to all East Timorese protection visa applicants who wished to stay.

The appeal to the Federal Government comes after Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock announced in March that his department would soon begin deciding the claims of East Timorese who had sought protection visas.

Mr Bracks announced his appeal to Mr Howard at a Richmond ALP function on Friday night. He said his government had also committed an extra $65,000 to the Refugee Immigration Legal Centre and was ensuring temporary protection visa holders had secure access to public housing and education.

Most of Melbourne's East Timorese live in or around the Richmond public housing estates. The North Richmond Community Health Centre's chief executive, Demos Krouskos, said the political situation had changed in East Timor, but the community's wish to remain here had not. Their experience in East Timor was of dispossession, trauma and violence.

"They have been here at least 10 years, the vast majority of them. They have established a new life. To basically uproot this community would have very severe consequences on the health of those families – the emotional and psychological stresses would be very destructive," he said.

Among the East Timorese is a group of Hakka-speaking ethnic Chinese, some of whom feared persecution if they returned. Mr Ruddock's spokesman, Steve Ingram, said if there were grounds for using section 417 of the Immigration Act they would be applied on a case-by-case basis, not by group. If section 417 were not invoked, applicants would need to prove a well-founded fear of persecution.

He said most East Timorese arrived during the summer of 1994-95, but processing their claims had been delayed by court cases and because of the changing situation in East Timor.

"If you decide who stays or who goes on the basis of how long they have been here, that starts to degrade or undermine the system," Mr Ingram said.

Richmond MP Richard Wynne said the appeal was "a practical and compassionate response to a group of people who have lived a stateless existence for up to 10 years".