Sarah Hanson-Young ‘helps the people-smugglers’

TONY Abbott says all Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young’s actions help facilitate the people-smuggling trade.

TONY Abbott says all Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young’s actions help facilitate the people-smuggling trade and she is ­undermining the government’s efforts to stop the boats.

Lashing out at the Greens immigration spokeswoman a day after she maintained it was dangerous to send 157 asylum-seekers back to India without ­assessing their claims, the Prime Minister said he was “sure she’s a decent enough human being, but I certainly disagree with what she says’’.

“When it comes to boats we’ve just got to stop the people-smuggling trade and unfortunately all of her actions tend to facilitate the people-smuggling trade,’’ Mr Abbott told 2GB.

“I can’t imagine that she wants to see the trade resume ­because, if the trade resumes, the deaths resume. But she’s making it very, very difficult to put in place the policies and the actions that have been very effective over the last eight or nine months in bringing it almost to a halt.”

Senator Hanson-Young has been vocal against the Abbott government’s immigration policies and repeatedly argued they were inhumane.

Earlier this week she said that more than 200 Indian ­nationals had been granted refugee protection in Australia but Immigration Minister Scott Morrison hit out at the claim.

“Sarah Hanson-Young’s suggestion there were more than 200 Tamils who were either resident in or citizens of India who had been granted asylum in Australia for fear of persecution in India because of their Tamil ethnicity is false,’’ a spokeswoman for Mr Morrison said.

But Refugee Council of Australia chief executive Paul Power said the government’s decision to take the 157 asylum-seekers to the Curtin detention centre without testing their claims for refugee protection set a troubling precedent. “While the Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has described as ‘absurd and ­offensive’ the notion that people could be persecuted by India, it is a fact that asylum-seekers have fled persecution in India,’’ Mr Power said.

Labor immigration spokesman Richard Marles said the 157 cases needed to be individually assessed.