Australia stopped the boats - what the UK can learn from their success

The UK has ended up in an entirely predictable and avoidable situation when it comes to illegal migration. The small boats crisis was a political choice. The experiences of Australia has shown that.

The United Kingdom has ended up in an entirely predictable and avoidable situation when it comes to illegal migration. Between January and mid-October 2025, over 36,000 illegal migrants had arrived on British shores in small boats. This was up from 27,500 over the same period last year, and from some 7,000 in 2020. In total, since 2018, when this “small boats crisis” started, over 182,000 illegal migrants have arrived. Britain’s political class have allowed this to happen. The small boats crisis was a political choice.

Australia faced a similar issue with a surge of illegal migrants arriving by boat about 15 years ago. Some were genuine asylum seekers, fleeing terror, destruction, and persecution in their homeland. But many were simply economic migrants who believed it was worth risking the open ocean to “skip the queue” others wait patiently in for the chance at a better life down under.

Australia’s former High Commissioner to the UK, Alexander Downer, has described the process by which people smugglers created a new, illegal immigration pathway to aspiring migrants:

For a considerable fee, they brought people to Australia by boat from Indonesia and prepped them on how to be accepted as refugees. The migrants were told to throw away identity documents and make claims that they were being persecuted in some far off land. This game was not only hugely profitable for the people smugglers but was making a mockery of Australia’s immigration policies.

In the space of around five years, from 2008 to 2013, “irregular maritime arrivals” to Australia went from almost zero to over 20,000. The Liberal-National Coalition opposition parties, led by Tony Abbott, campaigned on a simple policy: stop the boats. After being elected in a landslide in September 2013, Abbott commenced Operation Sovereign Borders. The message to people smugglers was simple: “No way.” A poster published by the Government told would-be asylum seekers that: “The Australian Government has introduced the toughest border protection measures ever. If you get on a boat without a visa, you will not end up in Australia… Think again before you waste your money. People smugglers are lying.”

The policy was criticised by some as being unkind to the migrants, but along with securing Australia’s borders, it prevented hundreds of them from drowning at sea. Between 2007 and 2013, some 1,100-1,200 boat people died while attempting to get to Australia. Britain is facing a similar problem, with French authorities reporting in September this year that three people, including two children, had been crushed to death at the bottom of a boat carrying 70 people across the channel.

In June 2014, the Australian government announced that there had not been a successful boat arrival in six months. By July 2015, the Opposition Labor Party admitted that Operation Sovereign Borders had been a success. It has remained a bipartisan and highly successful policy in Australia ever since.

Australia’s solution was quite simple. Those making boat crossings would simply be turned back before they reached Australian waters. If their vessel was unsafe, they would be transferred to a safe one (provided by Australian taxpayers) and sent back. If they found themselves in Australian waters, they would be taken to an offshore processing facility (one was in Papua New Guinea and another on the island nation of Nauru). For having made the attempt, none of them would ever be offered the opportunity to settle in Australia.

In 2022, then Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson tried to establish a similar policy. Britain would send those attempting to arrive by boat to Rwanda, where their asylum claims could be processed. The policy faced several setbacks, including when the Johnson government abandoned planned boat turnbacks, which were crucial to Australia’s success. The Rwanda policy was also challenged in the European Court of Human Rights, showing that Brexit alone would not return to Britain her sovereignty.

When he was elected Prime Minister in July 2024, Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer quickly abandoned the Rwanda policy, and the boats increased in both frequency and size. Home Office figures reported by The Telegraph recently show that the average number of migrants per vessel has risen from seven in 2018 to 61 in 2025. One boat recently arrived with 125 migrants on board, the highest count ever recorded. Starmer has promised to address the crisis by “smashing the gangs” rather than stopping the boats. But the people smuggling business is clearly booming, and it would not be unfair to say that this is no longer a “small boats crisis”. Starmer’s policy has so far failed.

In a recent speech, Starmer said that there was “nothing compassionate or progressive in a vile trade that loads people into overcrowded boats [and] puts them in grave danger”. This is true. Nor is there anything compassionate or progressive in failing to address the problem at its root. The root is not the gangs, but the incentives which have allowed this market in people smuggling to be established in the first place. The Rwanda policy could have delivered an Australian-style message to both people smugglers and their clients: under no circumstances would an unauthorised person who paid a smuggler to get to the United Kingdom be allowed to settle there.

We know that Australia’s solution works, not because it worked once, but because it worked twice. Before Tony Abbott ever said the words “stop the boats”, Australia had implemented a similar policy: the ‘Pacific Solution’ established by Australia’s second-longest-serving Prime Minister, John Howard. The Pacific Solution saw illegal boat migrants redirected to detention centres in Papua New Guinea while their asylum claims were assessed. It was implemented in 2001 after a short but rapid increase in attempted illegal boat migration. By 2002, the problem was crushed entirely.

The reason why Australia saw a surge in illegal boat migration between 2009 and 2013 was that the then Labor government, starting under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2007, had abandoned the Pacific Solution and allowed the people smuggling incentives to spring up again. As one academic from the University of New South Wales has recounted, under Rudd the government’s “strategic priority was to externalise Australia’s border controls by enticing neighbouring states to deploy policing strategies that would disrupt and punish unauthorised refugee movement into Australia.” Does that not sound a bit like Starmer took a page out of Rudd’s book, withdrawing the Rwanda plan and paying France to police the problem for him? Tony Abbott’s pledge to “stop the boats” was not a radical proposal, but a return to normal programming. Rudd’s experiment had an entirely predictable outcome, as does Starmer’s.

Some criticism of the Conservatives’ Rwanda plan came from those who believe in the principles of smaller government, individual liberty, and are sceptical of state intervention. To them, it was concerning that the government would spend taxpayer money on flying asylum seekers to Rwanda in the name of enforcing immigration policy. But this misses the point. Those who believe in free markets and individual agency understand the power of incentives, and that is what is at the heart of the Australian-style solution. It may cost taxpayers millions of pounds to fly would-be illegal migrants to Rwanda, but by enforcing this policy in the most stringent terms, the business model of people smugglers is completely disrupted. Their potential customers, seeing that it is no longer possible to pay someone to get them to the UK, will quickly stop demanding passage to the UK.

Additionally, promises to “crush the gangs” is the king of big-state solutions that are destined to fail. It requires spending taxpayers’ money on foreign intelligence gathering and subsidising other states to whom immigration control is outsourced. Incentives remain because smugglers know that, if they can get through, Britain will still receive their clients. For as long as they can sell this hope to desperate or persecuted people, they will.

“If you want to stop the deaths, if you want to stop the drownings, you’ve got to stop the boats,” then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott said in 2015. “And thankfully we’ve stopped that in Australia because we’ve stopped the illegal boats, we’ve said to the people smugglers, ‘your trade has closed down’.”

Ahead of the 2013 election, recognising that the boat crisis had gotten out of hand under his ill-advised policies, Rudd tried to regain control by implementing a new ‘Australia and Papua New Guinea Regional Settlement Arrangement’, which was essentially a return to the Pacific Solution that he had dismantled. Perhaps Starmer will similarly find that his supposedly compassionate policy cannot work, and he will revive the abandoned policy of his predecessors.

Cian Hussey is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne, Australia. He writes No Permanent Solutions on Substack.