The mastermind behind Australia’s migrant crackdown has called on Keir Starmer to ‘reinstitute’ the Rwanda scheme.
Alexander Downer told the Prime Minister to ‘eat a bit of political humble pie’ and resurrect the scheme, which was scrapped last year in one of Starmer’s first acts after being elected into No 10.
Sir Keir insisted the deportation scheme was a £700million ‘gimmick’ which did nothing to cut migrant Channel crossings.
But Mr Downer, who was Australia’s minister for foreign affairs from 1996 to 2007, claimed the move was a ‘tragedy’ and believes it could have worked if the legal issues surrounding it ‘could be properly addressed’.
‘It would have worked assuming the legal issues could be properly addressed — and they were being,’ he told The Sun.
‘So the easiest thing for them to do would be to eat a bit of political humble pie and reinstitute the Rwanda scheme.’
Just earlier this week, Downing Street admitted the situation in the Channel was ‘deteriorating’ as the number of migrants reaching the UK topped 2,000 in a week for the first time in 21 months.
The 2,222 arrivals over seven days meant an average of one migrant reached Britain every four-and-a-half minutes.
Mr Downer has previously expressed his belief in having a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to illegal migration.
The former foreign minister was one of the masterminds behind Australia’s crackdown on illegal immigration in the early 2000s, which sought to punish migrants who arrived on the country’s shores by boat.
This meant sending them by boat to detention centres in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific island of Nauru, where migrants would be offered to return to their home countries and refugees were told they could resettle in another.
‘Once word got round that if you tried to get into Australia by boat you would not be allowed in and would be sent to Papua New Guinea instead, they ran out of customers. The smugglers’ businesses closed down,’ he previously said.
The Tony Abbott government claimed a 90 per cent reduction in maritime arrivals of asylum seekers once the policy was introduced in 2013. There were 207 arrivals in November that year, compared to 2,629 in November 2012.
Starmer has pledged to crack down on smuggling gangs that bring people into the UK in small boats, including by targeting criminal networks overseas.
Last month, he said the Government would start talks with other countries on ‘return hubs’ for failed asylum seekers, which would see failed asylum seekers sent for processing in third countries prior to deportation.
The PM admitted these would not be a ‘silver bullet’ for halting the crossings, but the proposal is expected to act as a deterrent.
Last week’s crossing total was the most since September 2023, when the former Tory government’s Rwanda policy was still in legal limbo.
It tipped the total since Labour came to power at last July’s general election past the 40,000 mark, hitting 40,276.
Since the start of this year, 17,034 migrants have reached Britain, up 38 per cent on the same period last year. The figure does not include hundreds more who reached Dover yesterday.
Reform leader Nigel Farage said it was ‘about time’ Britain faced up to the fact it was ‘our fault’ – rather than France’s – that so many migrants head here. ‘We will never stop the boats from leaving France,’ he told broadcaster Talk.
