Conservative United Kingdom leader Nigel Farage backs Tony Abbott's 'heroic' call to close

Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has urged European countries to turn refugee boats around to avoid a "catastrophic error".

The former Australian PM said that EU could learn lessons on how to deal with illegal immigration from his own country's experience, which has previously turned around boats and denied entry to those seeking safe haven.

"Our moral obligation is to receive people fleeing for their lives". There are tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of people living in poverty and danger who might readily seek to enter a Western country, if the opportunity is there. "No country or continent can open its borders to all comers without fundamentally weakening itself", Abbott said.

"In Europe, as with Australia, people claiming asylum - invariably - have crossed not one border but many; and are no longer fleeing in fear but are contracting in hope with people smugglers".

He said: "It will require force; it will require massive logistics and expense; it will gnaw at our consciences - yet it is the only way to prevent a tide of humanity surging through Europe and quite possibly changing it forever".

The backbencher pointed to Australia's tough measures to stop the boats as an example of how to stem the flow of people arriving in Europe from the war-torn Middle East.

Mr Fletcher said however, that Mr Abbott had made a "powerful point" that it was because Australia had strong border control policies we were able to offer 12,000 places to Syrian refugees.

Do you think Tony Abbott should be telling other countries how to manage refugees?

"I'm not sure that European leaders grappling with the scale and dimension of the problem, which we don't have in Australia, are necessarily going to benefit by Tony Abbott's advice", Mr Shorten told reporters in Sydney. A vast ocean was an ally, hardly comparable to the situation in the Mediterranean.

Abbott's argument about confining fleeing people to the first country they reach ignores the almost unbearable pressure that would put on those countries. "We've helped to contain its advance in Iraq but we haven't defeated it because it can't be defeated without more effective local forces on the ground", he said.

Two prominent Australian Catholics have slammed the former prime minister's comments, claiming that to "love thy neighbour as thyself" is one of the central messages of the New Testament - with the passage central to Christian ethics.

 

"As Margaret Thatcher so clearly understood over the Falklands, those who won't use decisive force where needed end up being dictated to by those who will". The ex-PM targeted the United Nations leaders' summit on terrorism in September, where the complete focus was on counter-attacking ISIS communities rather than emphasis on dealing with the caliphate effectively that inspires the ISIS extremists.