Liberal MP Petro Georgiou has slammed Tony Abbott’s back-to-the-Howard-era policy on asylum seekers, saying it is “cruel” and “victimises the persecuted”.

“It does not have my support,” Georgiou said after this morning’s release of the new policy by Abbott, Scott Morrison and Philip Ruddock.

Under the policy, the Pacific Solution is set for a return under an Abbott government. But the geography is not quite accurate because the Coalition has refused to identify to which country it will try to send asylum seekers, insisting that it cannot name the target country until it is in government.

Asylum seekers will also again be given temporary protection visas if they arrive illegally, which could be as short as six months. The TPV will have the same punitive restrictions as in the Howard era, including no right to family reunions. The return to TPVs was announced by Malcolm Turnbull in 2009.

TPVs were a notable and well-identified failure under the Howard government. They led to a 50% surge in asylum seekers coming by boat after TPVs were introduced in 1999, as the families of asylum seekers tried to reach Australia to join partners who had already reached Australia but who were not permitted to reunite with their families. TPVs were the reason so many women and children were aboard SIEV X, which sank in October 2001 trying to reach Australia, killing 288 women and children along with 65 men.

The return of the Pacific Solution continues the C0alition’s obsession with preventing the ‘processing’ of asylum seeker claims on mainland Australia, despite it having no impact on the process of determining whether a claim for asylum is valid, and no impact on the legal rights of applicants. The Coalition today argued “offshore processing” deprives people smugglers of a “product to sell”, ignoring that 90% of TPV holders under the Howard government were eventually given permanent visas.

Abbott also committed to “turn back the boats”; “where circumstances permit and vessels can be safely secured”.

The cost for the new Pacific Solution “will be funded from within the government’s existing budget estimates and projections,” the Coalition said this morning.  The original policy, under which the cost of processing each applicant was about $500,000, was estimated to have cost around $1 billion over five years, adding substantially to the pressure on the Coalition’s so-far limited savings initiatives.