Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has seized on Labor's admission it could adopt the government's policy of turning back asylum seeker boats to demand the opposition go further and support the reintroduction of temporary protection visas.
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In a significant shift, Labor immigration spokesman Richard Marles on Sunday said the opposition still had anxieties about turning back asylum seeker boats, but "might" continue the practice in government, sparking a furious backlash from Labor Left MPs who warned it was against "Labor values" and likely to fail.
Mr Marles' comments constitute a stunning turnaround for Labor, which has long opposed the Coalition's policy of turning back asylum seeker boats.
Last November Mr Marles called the tactic "pie in the sky" and said it would never last as ongoing policy, and as recently as July he said the efficacy of the policy could not yet be judged.
But since unwinding the Pacific Solution in 2008, Labor has come almost full circle to reinstate offshore processing and deny permanent visas to boat refugees.
In an interview with Fairfax Media, Mr Morrison invoked former Prime Minister John Howard as he declared legislation that would create two forms of temporary protection visas was "all about saying we will decide who gets permanent visas, we will decide who gets turned back, and we will decide where that decision is made in Australia under our laws, not out of the directives of Geneva or elsewhere".
Mr Morrison said the ALP should back his omnibus bill, which it voted against in the house last week and which comes to the Senate later this year, to re-establish TPVs, strengthen the legal framework for boat turn-backs and establish a fast-track system to process a backlog of 30,000 asylum seekers "that Labor never processed".
Despite the shift in language, Mr Morrison said Labor could not be trusted "because no one knows what they believe, and while they are weak and indecisive the people smugglers get rich".
"On the one hand they think turn-backs work but on the other hand they won't vote for them, to give the people out there doing them the added powers and support to keep doing their job safely and effectively," he said. "What this bill [the Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment] does is enshrine the legislative power for turn-backs and deny permanent visas to people who have arrived illegally by boat."
Only one asylum seeker boat has made it to Australian waters in 2014, compared with 401 in 2013, which mostly occurred under the former Labor government.
Mr Marles conceded that turn-backs had "had an impact" in reducing the flow of boats, but he said they had worked in conjunction with Kevin Rudd's policy of resettling refugees in Papua New Guinea instead of Australia if they came by boat.
He vowed Labor would not let the flow of asylum seeker boats from Indonesia restart, and said if turn-backs were to be an "enduring" policy continued across governments it needed Indonesia's co-operation.
"We get the impact but we do have anxieties about the policies, we're open-minded about it," Mr Marles told Sky News. "If there was a situation where Indonesia were co-operating with this policy, I think that's a complete game-changer."
But his about-turn sparked blowback from Labor's Left faction.
Backbencher Jill Hall praised Mr Marles as a "consultative and compassionate shadow minister" but told Fairfax Media "it's currently not Labor's policy to support turn-backs".
"Any change would be a shift in policy and it hasn't been to caucus and it would have to be approved by national conference next year," Ms Hall said.
Melissa Parke backed Ms Hall's comments and said turn-backs would "go against Labor's values".
"It would require a change of policy by Labor and I can't see that succeeding," she said.
