Tony Abbott is behaving like a “snake-oil merchant” by using the crisis in the Mediterranean Sea to score political points in Australia, Labor’s immigration spokesman has said.
On Monday the prime minister said there had been discussions with European officials when asked whether Europe had sought any advice on how to respond to the migration flows across the Mediterranean.
But on Tuesday a European Commission spokeswoman, Natasha Bertaud, denied there had been any official contact and said the “Australian model can never be a model for us”, because the policy involved the refoulement of people who could be genuine refugees.
After the comments, Labor’s immigration spokesman, Richard Marles, said Abbott was using the boat crisis for political point scoring in Australia. He told Sky News on Wednesday: “It’s the low-rent act of a snake-oil merchant and he should be called out as such.”
On Tuesday the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, acknowledged that Australia had worked with the Vietnamese government to return 46 asylum seekers intercepted at sea. The federal government had assessed the asylum seekers on board the Australian vessel that intercepted them, he said.
The comments follow a report in the Australian on Wednesday that said a number of EU member states’ representatives had asked for information on the workings of Operation Sovereign Borders.
An Italian admiral was also reported as saying Australia’s policy of turning back boats was not a practical solution in the Mediterranean.
