Why “Stop The Boats” May Not Work For Rishi Sunak Like It Did For Australia’s Right

It wasn’t exactly subtle. But that was the point. “STOP THE BOATS” screamed Rishi Sunak’s latest lectern slogan in red and white capital letters when he defended his Rwanda deportation legislation late last year.

The three-word slogan is familiar to many. 

In 2013, the then Liberal Australian opposition leader Tony Abbott coined the phrase for his election-winning campaign. A decade later, the ‘Australian method’ is now promoted to Europe as a copy-and-paste solution for its migrant crisis. 

Rishi Sunak has eagerly adopted the line, first crafted by Mark Textor of Crosby Textor – the same firm that trained the Conservative’s current campaign director, Isaac Levido. Stopping the Boats remained at top of Sunak’s agenda at his new year speech in Lancashire on Monday.

The appeal of mimicking the wedge politics that broke Australia’s Labor party on the same issue is obvious. But running on an absolutist migration pledge when you lack the absolutist solutions that were available to Australia invites immense danger for the Tories.

Australia’s Pacific Solution dates back to the country’s 2001 election and the Tampa Affair, named after the Norwegian merchant vessel which rescued around 430 asylum seekers from their sinking vessel. 

Adamant that these methods not be rewarded and others encouraged, the Liberal government, led by John Howard, struck deals to send asylum seekers intercepted at sea to the Pacific Islands of Nauru and Papua New Guinea. 

The policy was ferociously condemned by some in the international community, human rights lawyers and the Australia Labor party. 

Combined with 9/11, which happened a few weeks after Tampa, national security emerged as a central theme of the election that the Liberals had been poised to lose. 

B