"Our approach must be to protect the external borders and to tell whoever tries to come to Europe illegally, 'You won’t get through’," Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz said during an interview with POLITICO | Joe Klamar/AFP via Getty Images Austrian proposal for an Australian migration solution Sebastian Kurz pushes crackdown, reflecting a political shift to the right across EU.

Austria’s foreign minister Sebastian Kurz has a proposal that many in Brussels won’t appreciate: Stop refugees from reaching European soil.

In an an interview with POLITICO in Brussels this week, Kurz urged the European Union to apply the “Australian model,” referring to a controversial asylum policy in which military vessels intercept shaky boats full of migrants and return them to their countries of origin or shunt them off to detention centers in third countries.

“Our approach must be to protect the external borders and to tell whoever tries to come to Europe illegally, ‘You won’t get through’,” he said.

Kurz’s position adds a stiff dose of rancor into one of the most politically toxic issues facing the EU. European leaders meeting in Brussels for a summit Thursday have already conceded they will be unable to come to an agreement on how to tackle the influx of refugees in the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas.

His statements also echoed the language and framing used by far-right political parties across the Continent, marking a potential shift rightward in the European migration debate. “We have to stop illegal migrants at the external border, care for them, bring them back to their countries of origin, and if that is not possible, protect them in centers outside Europe that we operate and finance,” Kurz said. That should happen “the sooner the better,” he said, adding that “if the political will is there, such a thing can be very quickly organized.”

Australia’s asylum policy, in which asylum seekers are transferred to detention camps in Nauru or Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, has come under heavy criticism from groups such as Human Rights Watch, which described conditions in the camps as “prison-like,” with detainees subject to harrassment, violence and sexual assault.

"It would be wrong to continue to host just the ones who make it to Europe by paying people smugglers" — Sebastian Kurz

European leaders had already agreed Malta should attempt to broker an accord on migration when it holds the EU’s six-month rotating presidency during the first half of 2017.

Kurz’s interjection is an indication the framework of an agreement could look quite different from what the European Commission tabled earlier this year, when it called for a permanent and compulsory relocation of asylum seekers within the EU.

Eastern European countries have argued they should be allowed to refuse to take in migrants in exchange for financial compensation to the countries where they arrived. Kurz’s proposal risks sending the process back to square one, making the case that relocation quotas are not needed.

Quotas, he argued, would in any case be impossible to implement. “I would wonder how long the refugees would stay in Romania, Portugal or Poland, and how long it would take to get on the train and go to Berlin, Munich or Vienna.”

Instead of shuffling people inside the EU, Kurz called for resettlement programs in which European countries would take “people, the weakest of the weak, in their countries of origin and bring them directly to Europe.” Applications would be processed, he said, in “centers” in countries such as “Tunisia, Egypt and Georgia.” Such a system would be “much cheaper and more humane than what we are doing now,” he said.

“We must decouple the search for protection from the search for a better life, although I can personally fully understand the wish for a better life,” Kurz said. “Then the number of those who are on their way illegally will drop massively, and we will have the opportunity to provide more aid locally and set up resettlement programs to take as many as we can integrate.”

“It would be wrong to continue to host just the ones who make it to Europe by paying people smugglers,” he said. “That would be unfair and would mean that human traffickers keep making money. It would lead to chaos in Europe, and the worst thing: it leads to a massive drowning in the Mediterranean.”

Parties across the political spectrum in Austria have proposed to drastically limit the number of refugees. The far-right Freedom Party candidate for the Austrian presidency, Norbert Hofer, may have lost in a run-off against former Green leader Alexander Van der Bellen earlier this month, but he still secured 46 percent of the vote, representing some 2.1 million Austrians.

Kurz, 30, has served three years as a foreign minister and is considered a contender to replace Reinhold Mitterlehner as leader of the Christian Democrats.

In the interview, he said many European leaders agree with him in private, but acknowledged that “there is still resistance in public statements among many.”

“There is still an outcry by many when they hear the buzzword ‘Australia,’ but at the same time the German federal government informally tries to do exactly that, and so does the Commission. They negotiate with countries that are willing to let us build centers there to accommodate people outside Europe so that we don’t have to host them in Europe.”

A Commission spokesperson said: “We do not have any plans to build migrant camps outside the European Union. Also, under EU legislation it is not possible to apply for asylum outside the EU, and there is no intention to change that.”

A German government official said that “migration partnerships” that the EU is seeking to strike with five African countries is not about building facilities to process asylum requests, nor “about giving countries money to build walls,” but to help countries create proper jobs so people don’t have the incentive to work as smugglers.