Labor’s decision to adopt asylum boat turnbacks as an option is a “bad karaoke version” of the Coalition’s policy, former immigration minister Scott Morrison has said.
The opposition leader, Bill Shorten, won a heated debate against the Labor left which wanted to ban boat turnbacks at the ALP’s national conference over the weekend.
The prime minister, Tony Abbott, said divisions within the party showed it was “horribly divided” on the issue of turnbacks.
“They’d argue amongst themselves because that’s what we saw, a ferocious argument,” Abbott said on Monday. “This is a dangerously divided Labor party, almost indistinguishable from the Greens when it comes to border protection policies.”
Labor’s new platform would give the party the option to turn back asylum seeker boats “where it is safe to do so” if they won office.
Morrison, now social services minister, was the architect of the Coalition’s hardline border policy, and said Labor were “very poor impersonators”.
“It’s a very bad karaoke version of the Coalition’s policy, it doesn’t even approach it,” he told Macquarie Radio on Monday. “It [turnbacks] can’t be an option, it should be the option.”
Morrison accused Shorten of acting out of “political self-interest”, saying that internal divisions within Labor mean that turnbacks will never eventuate if the party wins office.
“If he can’t keep his own cabinet together on this in opposition, how on earth would he implement a policy like this,” Morrison asked. “It’s a hopeless joke.”
“Who are the people smugglers really going to believe? The Coalition, who has demonstrated their commitment to this, or the Labor party who opposed what we wanted to do,” he continued. “These guys only voted against turnbacks last November. They’re not convincing anyone.”
Retired major general Jim Molan helped formulate the Coalition’s asylum policy. He told ABC TV on Monday he was “greatly comforted” by the fact that Labor has acknowledged “that the Coalition is right” on border protection.
“The only record that the poor old ALP’s got on this is a record of failure,” he said. “We should never assume that everyone who gets on a boat to come to Australia or crosses the Mediterranean to go to Europe comes straight off Schindler’s list.”
“No Australian should ever feel embarrassed about what Australia is doing in relation to refugees,” he said. “We are well up there with the best in the world.”
The shadow immigration minister, Richard Marles, told ABC Radio that Labor wanted the same options that are open to the Coalition. “We would want the full suite of measures that the government has available to it now,” he said.
He refused to deny that Labor would turn back boats to source countries, as has reportedly happened to an asylum boat that was intercepted off the West Australian coast last week.
Marles said no boat would be turned back to a source country – the original place from where asylum seekers are fleeing – without authorities first undertaking onboard assessments. The Coalition has undertaken similar assessments in the past.
“We would want to make sure that as a government any process we put in place passes muster with the UNHCR and we will be talking to them about that,” he said.
Abbott would not comment on whether the boat had been returned to Vietnam, citing the government’s refusal to talk about “on the water” operational matters.
“We haven’t felt the need to broadcast what government is doing on a moment-by-moment basis. We haven’t felt the need to big-note ourselves,” Abbott said. “That was what the former government did. It talked about itself. It didn’t actually get on with the job of securing our borders.”
The Greens have condemned the reports.
“Handing these people directly over to the Vietnamese government constitutes refoulement, which is a breach of the refugee convention,” Greens immigration spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young said.
She has called on the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, to seek assurances from Hanoi that the failed asylum seekers will not be harmed.
“There are grave fears that those handed back to the Vietnamese authorities will be punished, jailed and further abused as a result of trying to escape,” she said. “There has been an increase in people escaping religious persecution in Vietnam, particularly from Christian minorities.
“What has the Australian government done to make sure these families sent back to Vietnam won’t face further persecution?”
The president of the Victorian branch of the Vietnamese Community in Australia, Bon Nguyen, has told the ABC that he has “great fear” for the safety of the failed asylum seekers.
“If [the] Australian government has returned them back to Vietnam already, please have some sort of monitor program so that our Australian embassies in Vietnam can actually keep an eye on them,” he said.
