Dutton attacks Shorten over asylum seekers

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has unleashed a ferocious attack against Bill Shorten over Labor's stance on border protection.

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd lobbed a grenade into the debate on Thursday by claiming asylum seekers held in offshore detention, under an agreement he initiated in 2013, should have been resettled in Australia after a year.

Labor frontbenchers have rejected his claim but Mr Dutton is not satisfied, arguing the opposition leader tried to hoodwink Australians at the 2016 election by saying he was in lock-step with the coalition on border security.

Mr Dutton's spray also extended to opposition immigration spokesman Shayne Neumann, who he derided as the weakest man in federal parliament, and "second- and third-rate" Labor MPs doing their leader's bidding.

"The test today is for Bill Shorten not to send out his henchmen, to call Kevin Rudd a liar, but for Mr Shorten actually to have the guts to stump-up to do it himself," the immigration minister said in Brisbane on Friday.

"And if Kevin Rudd is suggesting, as Bill Shorten did at the last election, that somehow Labor's policy would be the same as the coalition's, it's a nonsense."

Mr Shorten twice refused to denounce Kevin Rudd's claims when pressed by reporters in Melbourne, instead arguing it was Mr Dutton who was rewriting history and playing political games.

"What Mr Dutton should be doing is focusing on negotiations with other nations to have these people resettled," he said.

Mr Shorten cautioned the immigration minister against questioning bipartisan support for boat turn-backs and stopping people smugglers.

"He should be ashamed of himself because all he's doing is giving oxygen to those crooks and criminals in other parts of the world putting vulnerable people on unsafe vessels and exposing them to death at sea," he said.