David Friedman provides a very insightful and humane perspective:
From the standpoint of the asylum seekers, [Australia's Home Minister] O'Connor and the Australian navy are the enemy. The "people smugglers" are the ones on their side, the people who, for a price, are trying to get them into Australia. O'Connor is trying to keep them out. In an attempt to obscure that fact, he describes the situation as the immigrants "falling prey to" the people smugglers.
I am reminded of President Clinton's explanation that the reason he was having the U.S. coastguard turn back people trying to escape from Haiti to the U.S. was for their own good, the crossing being a dangerous one. That was the point at which I decided that, whatever his qualifications as a President, Clinton was a pretty poor excuse for a human being. Stopping desperate people from escaping from their particular hell may, under some circumstances, be excusable. Pretending that you are doing it for their good is not.
If only there had been enough more of those wicked people smugglers in the late thirties for desperate emigrants to fall prey too, it might have been only five million. [Emphasis added]