No heart in PNG plan, says Tassie bishop

A senior Anglican bishop who told the prime minister "Jesus weeps" over the PNG asylum seeker plan says Australia has lost its heart.

The bishop of Tasmania, John Harrower, took to Twitter to compare Australia with biblical Jerusalem - wealthy but without a sense of compassion.

"Mr Prime Minister, Jesus weeps. Whatever you do for the least of these..." Bishop Harrower tweeted.

He says Australia's generosity during the Asian tsunami and, more recently, the Tasmanian bushfires is in danger of disappearing.

"I wonder what's happening to Australia's heart," he told AAP.

"We have been, as our national anthem says, a place of hospitality.

"Yet here we are not being what we're called to be in the same way that Jerusalem at that time was not being what it was called to be.

"Jesus wept then and I'm sure Jesus weeps now."

Bishop Harrower described the new policy as "reprehensible" and said Christian leaders Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott should be working on a genuine regional solution that included refugees in Australia.

The emphasis on preventing drownings was a cop out, he said.

"It almost seems that we put up the drowning of the people, which we need to be rightfully concerned for, as some sort of justification for doing something else that seems to me to be quite horrendous," he said.

"They're fleeing for their lives so of course they're going to take risks."

Bishop Harrower said Australia was living in "cloud cuckoo land" if it thought it could be immune to the problem of millions of refugees on the move internationally.

"If we didn't have that stretch of sea and we were bordering on Syria at the moment ... we'd have tens if not hundreds of thousands of these people living in Australia and we'd be needing to set up proper refugee camps," he said.

"That's what I'd like to think we ought to be doing."

The bishop said the response to his tweet had been "overwhelmingly positive".