Labor says the government must come clean on payments to people smugglers to restore relations with Indonesia.

Indonesia’s foreign affairs ministry claims to have evidence Australian officials paid $30,000 to five crew members to turn their boat around, but says it is yet to receive any clarification about this.

The opposition’s foreign affairs spokeswoman, Tanya Plibersek, said the prime minister, Tony Abbott, owed a full explanation to Indonesia and the Australian people.

Senator David Leyonhjelm says people smugglers accepting payment to turn their boats back makes a certain amount of sense. Link to video

“We have seen the foreign minister and the immigration minister flat out deny it and then the prime minister seems to indicate that this may have happened,” she said in Sydney on Saturday.

“It is absolutely vital that the prime minister does what he has to do to get this relationship back on track.”

Earlier this week, Abbott said he was absolutely confident Australian agencies had acted within the law at all times.

Indonesia’s vice president, Jusuf Kalla, has also said if Australia paid people smugglers to return asylum seekers to his country, that would amount to bribery and possibly even people-trafficking.

The Australian federal police and the auditor general are assessing the claim.

Plibersek was also asked about the government’s plan to strip citizenship from dual nationals suspected of terrorism and said Labor would not support the new laws without first scrutinising them.



The prime minister avoids responding to questions about whether legal advice on proposed changes to citizenship laws was withheld from the cabinet. Link to video

The government is expected to bring a bill to parliament next week giving the immigration minister the power to revoke the citizenship of dual nationals.



Abbott has said the opposition must support the bill in the interests of national security, but Labor is refusing to tick off on any proposed laws before MPs can examine them.



“We have been talking about this quite long enough; the prime minister should release draft legislation to be examined,” Plibersek said.



She said Labor would be inclined to support provisions allowing the government to strip dual nationals of their citizenship for fighting against Australia with non-state actors.



But she said there also was a need for bipartisan scrutiny of all changes to national security laws, as there had been in the past.



There remain concerns among cabinet ministers, including Malcolm Turnbull, that the bill needs more work on legal protections to ensure it is not overturned in the high court.



Sky News has quoted “three senior government sources” who claim the advice of the solicitor general, believed to have raised doubts about the constitutional legality of the move, had only been seen by the prime minister, attorney general and immigration minister, and not the cabinet.