Birmingham: British politician Nigel Farage has pledged to stop asylum seeker boats within two weeks of winning an election and passing drastic new laws to deport migrants, pointing to Australia as proof that his plan can work.

Farage cited former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott and his policies to insist that boats would stop crossing the English Channel within weeks of similar UK measures coming into force.

The controversial leader, once derided for being unable to beat the UK’s two major political parties, energised thousands of supporters at a party conference in Birmingham on the weekend, as he rides high in the opinion polls.

More than 43,000 asylum seekers arrived by boat across the channel in the year to June 30, fuelling fears about migration and helping Farage and his party, Reform UK, while the Labour government vows to cut the numbers.

Farage wrapped up the party conference, surrounded by supporters eager to have him sign their Reform UK shirts, just as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer tries to recover from a political crisis by appointing a new minister to bring the migration numbers under control.

Starmer appointed Shabana Mahmood, the daughter of migrants from Pakistan and highly regarded in her previous position in the justice portfolio, as the new Home Secretary, as part of the reshuffle triggered by the resignation of deputy prime minister Angela Rayner.

Mahmood is expected to toughen Labour’s policy on asylum seekers by approving the construction of housing on defence land, amid protests outside hotels being used to house the arrivals. She is likely to meet her Australian counterpart, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, when he visits London in the coming days.

The Australian example is now central to the Reform UK policy plan after Farage backtracked on a pledge to stop the boats within two weeks of taking power, saying he meant within two weeks of passing new laws after the election.

Facing sceptical interviewers on the sidelines of his party conference, Farage named Abbott and the former prime minister’s tough measures in 2013 – which included turning boats back to Indonesia – as the key comparison.

“As soon as the law is in place, as soon as we have the ability to detain and deport, we’ll stop it in two weeks,” he told the BBC.

“By the way, Australia did exactly this in 2012 [sic] – they spent years, as we’ve spent, wrangling. They passed bits of legislation, they put together offshore processing centres. None of it worked.

“And in the end, they had the legal base to allow Tony Abbott, the prime minister then, to tow the boats back to Indonesia. Within two weeks, they stopped coming.”

The claims overstate the speed of the Australian policy, which took months to come into full force after Abbott won the September 2013 election and introduced Operation Sovereign Borders to turn boats back.

Abbott has suggested the UK should learn from the Australian policy and wrote two years ago in The Telegraph that he succeeded when sceptics said his policy would not work.

“My government built on the Howard [government] formula: boat turn-backs to stop people leaving for Australia in the first place, offshore processing so that those who were picked up at sea never made it to Australia, and temporary visas so that those who did get here couldn’t stay,” he wrote.

When boats were scuttled by people smugglers, Abbott wrote, the Australian policy was to put asylum seekers in unsinkable lifeboats just outside Indonesia’s maritime limit with only enough fuel to make it back to Java.

While Farage is promising a rapid stop if he wins the next UK election, official Australian figures show that boats kept arriving for some time after Abbott won the election in September 2013.

Boats kept arriving and officials decided some were not safe to turn back, so there were 221 asylum seekers and crew in November and 369 in December, according to government figures given to the Senate.

The arrivals fell sharply after that point, and Abbott announced on March 29, 2014, that Australia had gone 100 days without any asylum seeker boats landing on Australian shores.

Farage rallied Reform UK supporters at the Birmingham conference – held in a corporate exhibition centre on the edge of the industrial city – with a vision for sweeping victories in council elections next year.

Targeting elections in Wales and Scotland as well, Farage called for 5000 party members to stand in the elections.

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