ABSTRACT
Because Australia is a remote island continent it receives fewer applications for asylum from refugees than almost any country in the developed world. And yet, for reasons of some complexity, it has begun, in recent years, to treat those applications with almost unparalleled harshness. In 1994 the federal Labor government decided to detain all asylum seekers, on arrival, in prison-like camps. At this time the number of asylum seekers was small. In October 1999, however, boats from Indonesia bearing refugees, chiefly from Afghanistan and Iraq, began arriving on Australia’s north-west coast. Approximately 4,000 boat refugees landed in 2000 and the same number again in the first eight months of 2001. All were sent, at first, to the growing system of detention camps.
