“And in the end, they had the legal base to allow Tony Abbott, the prime minister then, to tow the boats back to Indonesia. Within two weeks, they stopped coming.”
The claims overstate the speed of the Australian policy, which took months to come into full force after Abbott won the September 2013 election and introduced Operation Sovereign Borders to turn boats back.
Abbott has suggested the UK should learn from the Australian policy and wrote two years ago in The Telegraph that he succeeded when sceptics said his policy would not work.
“My government built on the Howard [government] formula: boat turn-backs to stop people leaving for Australia in the first place, offshore processing so that those who were picked up at sea never made it to Australia, and temporary visas so that those who did get here couldn’t stay,” he wrote.
When boats were scuttled by people smugglers, Abbott wrote, the Australian policy was to put asylum seekers in unsinkable lifeboats just outside Indonesia’s maritime limit with only enough fuel to make it back to Java.
While Farage is promising a rapid stop if he wins the next UK election, official Australian figures show that boats kept arriving for some time after Abbott won the election in September 2013.
Boats kept arriving and officials decided some were not safe to turn back, so there were 221 asylum seekers and crew in November and 369 in December, according to government figures given to the Senate.
The arrivals fell sharply after that point, and Abbott announced on March 29, 2014, that Australia had gone 100 days without any asylum seeker boats landing on Australian shores.
Farage rallied Reform UK supporters at the Birmingham conference – held in a corporate exhibition centre on the edge of the industrial city – with a vision for sweeping victories in council elections next year.
Targeting elections in Wales and Scotland as well, Farage called for 5000 party members to stand in the elections.
