COMMENTS by a senior Indonesian minister that a tsunami of 10,000 asylum seekers could be unleashed on Australia in revenge for complaints about the executions of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran are a new low in a deteriorating diplomatic battle.

Political, Legal and Security Affairs minister, Tedjo Edhy Purdijatno, was quoted on high-rating and government-preferred Metro TV as saying Indonesia would release asylum seekers if Australia continued to upset Indonesia.

“There are more than 10,000 in Indonesia,” Mr Purdijatno said of asylum seekers. “If they are let go to Australia, it will be like a human tsunami.”

Prime Minister Tony Abbott responded to these comments saying he won’t be picking a diplomatic fight with Indonesia over the death row inmates.

When asked about the comment on Wednesday, Mr Abbott said he wanted to find a constructive solution.

“I’m not in the business of picking fights with anyone,” he said.

Drug smugglers Chan, 31, and Sukumaran, 33, are on Nusakambangan island, where Indonesia will give them 72 hours notice of their execution.

Lawyers will appeal to a court on Thursday to have their case for clemency considered.

Mr Abbott said he understood the Indonesian government’s desire to crack down on drug crime, as this was his own government’s aim. “But these two individuals, because they’re reformed, have now become an asset in Indonesia’s fight against drug crime and that’s why I think it would be counter-productive to execute them.”

The claims by Mr Purdijatno that Indonesia would direct asylum-seekers towards Australia are thought ridiculous, but highlight how badly Indonesia has reacted to pleas for mercy for the Australians on death-row.

A foreign migration expert based in Jakarta said Purdijatno’s statement was “extraordinary”, but pointed out it would require Indonesia to deliberately organise boats for the asylum-seekers to assist their journeys to Australia.

The expert said that 7000 of the 10,000 asylum seekers were housed in “immigration centres and community housing”.

This would mean, in the unlikely case Mr Purdijatno’s comments had any credibility, that Indonesian authorities would set them free from detention.

If so, this would be akin to Cuba’s Mariel boatlift of 1980, when Fidel Castro said any discontented people who wanted to leave Cuba could do so, resulting in more than 125,000 Cubans taking boats to Florida to begin new lives.

Castro opened his jails and dumped his worst criminals on American soil. The difference is that Mr Purdijatno is talking about hopeless, stateless and desperate people.

And that, to a degree, includes Chan and Sukumaran, who are increasingly becoming pawns in a game played by new and inexperienced government ministers who speak without thinking.

All of it makes it harder for the Australians, and those who will be executed alongside them for drug crimes.

According to the UNHCR there are more than 10,000 asylum-seekers in Indonesia, most who have forestalled their plans to take boats to Australia.

Kevin Rudd, who reopened the way to asylum seekers in early 2008 by ending the Pacific Solution, later realised he had made a serious political miscalculation after people started coming by sea — and dying — in great numbers.

Mr Rudd changed his tune for his own political survival, releasing a statement in July 2013 saying that no one who arrived by boat would ever settle in Australia but could find new lives in Papua New Guinea.

It was, for Mr Rudd, a failed chance to try and save his prime ministership.

The boats almost immediately stopped coming but he lost the election regardless. Incoming prime minister, Tony Abbott, continued Rudd’s policy and has since claimed victory for “stopping the boats”.