Despite it being a perennial topic during Elections this century, neither major party wants to talk about asylum seekers this time around.
After 10 years of scaremongering, Peter Dutton has given up trying to tell us we are about to be invaded by an impending armada of boat arrivals. He also knows that it was his negligence that from 2015 led to the biggest labour trafficking scam abusing the asylum system in our history. That may explain why he hasn’t brought up the issue this time.
While Labor put more resources into processing asylum claims to stabilise the number of asylum applications at the primary level and at the Administrative Review Tribunal, it knows it has not done enough to stabilise growth in the number of people who have been refused at both the primary level and at the ART (see Table 1).
Why has there been no discussion of asylum-seekers in this campaign? By Abul Rizvi, P&I