Fiji’s prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, has slapped down the Liberal MP John Alexander for suggesting Australia should prioritise helping people in the Pacific move to higher ground to avoid sea-level rise over reducing its use of coal.

In a speech at the Australasian Emissions Reduction Summit at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Bainimarama said Fiji was already feeling effects of climate change and had moved three communities to safer territory, while a further 40 were in a queue awaiting relocation.

Bainimarama also criticised a suggestion by the former prime minister Kevin Rudd that Australia should offer citizenship to Pacific islanders in exchange for control of their fisheries.

“In a time where we must be future-facing, we can hardly tolerate such insensitive, neocolonial prescriptions,” he said. “I implore leaders of Australia to visit these communities and see them first-hand before they propose solutions that are so blatantly out of touch with the reality we Pacific islanders live with on the ground, day in and day out.”

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Speaking at a forum last week, Alexander reportedly noted Bainimarama’s repeated call for Australia to stop burning coal and developing new coalmines but said the priority should be to help people to move their settlements to higher ground. According to Nine newspapers, he said: “It’s very much like your house is on fire, your children are in the house – should you call the fire brigade and get the children out of the house?”

The Bennelong MP later told ABC radio his point was that adaptation was a priority but “we must also act to prevent further damage to our planet”.

Bainimarama said the decision to relocate a community may seem easy but for those affected there was deep emotional loss.

“An elderly Fijian widow now wakes up in the morning to find the ocean at her doorstep, slowly wearing away a home she and her family have known for generations,” he said. “A young Fijian sugarcane farmer, who learned how to toil the ground from his father and his father before him, now watches helplessly as the fields that fuel his livelihood become too salty for crops to grow. And an entire coastal village mourns as the graves of their ancestors are forever inundated and washed away, robbing them of the deep and spiritual connection to their land.

“They have no choice – it is a matter of survival. But despite the enormous difficulty of these decisions, Fiji is lucky we even have the higher ground to allow for relocation at all. I’m keen to hear what [Alexander] believes the people of Kiribati should do in the face of rising seas, where the highest point in their country sits at just 1.8 metres above sea level.”

He said relocation was “enormously complex”, requiring space, resources and new livelihoods. “That is why Fiji has developed the world’s first relocation guidelines and is in the process of establishing a relocation trust fund dedicated to this purpose,” he said.

The Fijian leader said it was a mistake to only focus on the costs of cutting emissions while ignoring that mitigation created new technologies and economic opportunities.

He said Fiji knew Australia was willing to help it, citing the assistance offered in the wake of Cyclone Winston in 2016.

“But if that’s where we focus all of our energy we’ll be faced with a climate catastrophe that no nation can navigate,” he said. “We need to address the root of the problem by urgently modernising and decarbonising our economies and societies.

“There are some encouraging signs of this leadership around the world. Countries as small as Fiji and the Marshall Islands, and as large as Canada and France, and New Zealand and the Scandinavian countries, all pledged to increase their national climate commitments. Australia should make the same commitment.”

The speech came as the New Zealand government introduced legislation designed to cut all greenhouse gases except biogenic methane from sheep and cattle to zero by 2050. Its target for biogenic methane is a cut of between 24% and 47% below 2017 levels.

Pacific leaders will meet the United Nations secretary general, Antonio Guterres, in Fiji next Wednesday to discuss climate change before a UN climate action summit in September.