KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 15 — Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott has come under fire by the country’s lawmakers for expressing regret over not backing a proposed people swap dubbed the “Malaysia Solution”.
Australian Labour Party senator Stephen Conroy said he was “absolutely gobsmacked” to hear of Abbott’s remorse on a decision that could have prevented the death of 600 refugees.
The “Malaysia Solution” was a deal signed by Abbott’s predecessor, Julia Gillard, to swap 800 asylum seekers in exchange for 4000 processed refugees from Malaysia. The deal fell through following opposition in both countries.
“I mean what sort of outrageous behaviour was Tony Abbott engaged in? This was a solution which would have seen no need for Nauru, would have seen no need for Manus Island,” Conroy was quoted as saying by Australian news portal The Australian.
“Tony Abbott now looks back wistfully and says, ‘Oh well maybe I was just playing politics a bit too much’. I think that Tony Abbott’s commentary recently needs to be highlighted, because this would have avoided all of these problems.”
Abbott said on Friday that he wondered if his opposing Gillard’s refugee-swap initiative, dubbed the “Malaysia solution” back in 2011, had resulted in the “hyper-partisanship” that now “poisons” Australian politics, UK daily The Guardian reported.
The Australian High Court in 2011 ruled that the “Malaysian solution” was invalid and Abbott, who was prime minister from 2013 to 2015, refused to support a government bill to override the ruling.
The Guardian reported last week that over 2,000 leaked incident reports of Australian detention centres on remote Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus revealed “serious allegations of sexual assault and child abuse.”
According to the leaked documents, there were seven reports of sexual assault of children and 59 reports of assault on children, with instances of guards trading additional privileges in exchange of sexual favours and of guards slapping children across the face.
“All of the problems that have now emerged from Nauru and Manus wouldn’t have happened if the Malaysian solution had been adopted as Tony Abbott now says he should have done,” Conroy said.
“They were ready to close down the Australian option. We literally were being told that by our security and policing services that when the first plane took off and landed in Malaysia that was it for Australia,” he added.
Sky News Australia quoted Australia’s Opposition Leader Bill Shorten as saying that the government owed the public an explanation and that it was “arrogant to simply dismiss it” now that news of the abuses at the two detention facilities were public.
“We are proposing a senate inquiry and I hope the government in the spirit of bipartisanship will accept our invitation and support a senate inquiry into the detention of people in Nauru.
“I think it’s very telling that Tony Abbott himself said that he wishes he’d gone with Labour’s Malaysia solution a few years ago and we could have perhaps avoided what we’re seeing now,” he was quoted as saying.
