Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ)
Australia has spent a quarter of a century selling the world a simple idea: crack down on boats at the border, and people will believe you have migration under control.
As Australian politicians and advisers have promoted this model abroad, other governments have bought in. The United Kingdom borrowed Australia’s “stop the boats” slogan and tried to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. European governments are pursuing offshore processing, turnbacks and “return hubs”.
The model began with the Tampa affair 25 years ago, but its political message is misleading. While the asylum crackdown rhetoric has lasted decades, it has disguised the deregulation of many other parts of Australia’s immigration system.
Successive governments have not tightened overall control of immigration. If anything, they have loosened it.
What was the Tampa affair?
In August 2001, an Indonesian fishing boat carrying 433 asylum seekers, mostly Hazara Afghans, became stranded in the Indian Ocean. The Norwegian freighter Tampa rescued them.
When its captain tried to bring them to Australian territory, the Howard government refused.
Australian special forces boarded the Tampa to prevent it entering Australian waters. Within weeks, parliament had cut several islands out of Australia’s migration zone and created the “Pacific Solution”. People arriving by boat could be sent to these excised islands and barred from settling in Australia, even if they were found to be refugees.
The government also introduced boat turnbacks. Then in 2013, the Rudd government added an even harder line: anyone trying to reach Australia by boat without a visa would never be allowed to settle here.
Decades of debate
For years, critics have attacked these policies for the suffering they cause.
That suffering is substantial, particularly in offshore detention. One study using Australian government records found 260 episodes of self-harm per 1,000 asylum seekers on Nauru in a single year. Among asylum seekers living in the Australian community, the rate was five per 1,000.
But supporters defend these policies for different reasons. They say the policies work to deter people smugglers and save lives at sea, while upholding the public’s faith in the migration system more broadly by showing the government has it under control.
This last claim is especially intriguing. In 2016, then Immigration Minister Peter Dutton argued Australia could take more refugees because strong border policies had built public confidence in a well-managed migration system. He later told a London audience that securing the border had restored confidence in Australia’s “overall migration program”.
And as recently as last week, John Howard told Politico the model had been a “sensible way of regulating migration while maintaining public support for migration”.
Proponents say the collapse in boat arrivals shows tough policies stop boats. In 2011–12, asylum seekers were almost evenly split between air and boat arrivals. Since 2013, about 99% have arrived by air.
But stopping the boats has not reduced onshore asylum claims overall. In 2024–25 Australia received almost three times as many claims as in 1998–99 (24,451 versus 8,257).
And boat arrivals are much more likely to be genuine refugees. In 2011–12, 91% of boat-arrival protection claims succeeded, versus 44% of air-arrival claims. Among post-2013 boat arrivals, at least 75% of asylum claims were accepted, compared with around 15% of claims by air arrivals.
Stopping boats therefore shows control over one small, symbolic arrival route – not asylum seeking as a whole, let alone migration more broadly.
And as the Howard government closed one small arrivals door, it quietly opened a much bigger one elsewhere in the migration system.
The rise of temporary migration
While it was shutting down asylum by boat, the Howard government was opening up temporary migration.
The temporary skilled 457 visa was introduced in 1996 and grew rapidly.
This changed the fabric of the migration system. The permanent migration program remained capped and carefully controlled by government, but much temporary migration became “demand-driven” rather than subject to an overall cap.
Universities recruited temporary students. Employers sponsored temporary workers. Farmers became dependent on temporary backpackers. Migrants moved between temporary visas. The size of the temporary system came to depend heavily on those separate decisions rather than on one overall government limit.
Harsh asylum policy did not prove migration as a whole was becoming more tightly controlled. It showed toughness in one small, but highly visible, part of the system while creating political room to loosen migration policy elsewhere.
Beyond stopping the boats
This is not just a criticism made by opponents of migration.
In 2023, then Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said Australia had two large migration programs: a capped permanent program and a demand-driven temporary one.
She went further. The “uncapped, unplanned temporary program”, she said, had become the centrepiece of Australia’s migration system. She called that system “broken”.
Governments have since tried to fix parts of it. But the scale remains vast.
At the end of 2025, more than three million people in Australia held temporary visas. That broad total includes New Zealand citizens and visitors.
Even excluding those two groups leaves well over 1.6 million people on other temporary visas, including students, temporary workers, working holidaymakers and more than 400,000 people on bridging visas.
None of this means temporary migration is bad. Australia benefits greatly from it.
Nor does “demand-driven” mean there are no rules. Every visa has rules.
But it is to say that for decades, Australian governments pointed to their success in stopping a small, symbolic flow of asylum seekers as proof they controlled migration.
But stopping boats tells us almost nothing about whether the much larger migration system is well run.
A convincing political performance
Public confidence in migration does matter, but governments should earn that confidence by managing migration well, not by staging shows of toughness at one politically sensitive edge of the system.
The real questions are less dramatic. How many temporary migrants are here? Why are they here? How long do they remain temporary? Are the programs meeting real economic and social needs? How do different visa programs fit together?
These questions will never produce the television pictures that boat arrivals do. But they matter far more to the size, shape and effects of migration.
Australia therefore needs to separate two debates that have been tied together for a quarter of a century. We need a humane, lawful and workable system for people seeking asylum. And we need much more deliberate management of temporary migration.
That lesson now matters far beyond Australia. The legacy of Tampa shows other governments looking to replicate Australia’s policies should be careful.
A government can be extraordinarily tough towards a small, visible group at the border while allowing a vastly larger migration system to grow without an overall numerical plan or ceiling.
That is not evidence of migration control. It is a political performance.
After 25 years, Australia – and the countries copying it – should stop confusing the two.
Read more:
What is migration for? How national needs wrestle with a basic human desire
Alan Gamlen receives funding from the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship scheme.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/31/australia-has-spent-25-years-stopping-the-boats-but-thats-not-the-same-as-controlling-migration/