It’s always good to get a new perspective on an old problem, particularly one debated with such sound and fury as refugees. .

Khalid Koser is associate dean at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy and co-editor of the Journal of Refugee Studies. A paper he has just written as non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute conveys the outsider's sense of wonderment about our reaction to boatpeople.

"Australia is not undergoing an asylum crisis of the sort that warrants such attention," he writes. "To be sure, asylum and immigration are near the top of the political agenda in many other industrialised countries, especially in Europe and political leaders there have ramped up their rhetoric against asylum-seekers, especially during national elections.

"But in a period of global downturn, no other government has translated rhetoric into policy in the way that the Australian government has."
He marvels at the resources we are prepared to devote to the problem, including $654 million over four years to combat people smuggling and hundreds of millions on expanded detention centres.

"It is very unlikely indeed that any other country in the world currently spends as much on asylum-seekers in terms of the ratio of costs to individuals involved as Australia," he says.

And all this for measures he believes may not even succeed in their narrow aim of reducing boat arrivals, let alone addressing the root causes of refugee flows.

Koser notes that, though asylum applications in Australia have increased, they still were only 2 per cent of the total for industrialised countries in 2009.

While over the past decade between 70 and 97 per cent of Australian boat arrivals have been assessed as refugees, for those who come by plane the figure is only 20 per cent.

"Arguably Australia is worrying about the wrong asylum-seekers," he says, particularly since the number of plane arrivals has been increasing as well, a fact that has received very little attention.

Immigration department figures confirm this point: asylum-seekers who came by air totalled 5074 in 2008-09, 5978 in 2009-10 and 1559 in the first three months of this financial year. However, boat people have increased faster: 1033 in 2008-09, 5609 in 2009-10 and 3053 in the (almost) first six months of 2010-11.

Koser's study is analytical and rational. But Gillard is unlikely to spend much time poring over it. She has a political problem based on the perception that she is weak on "illegal" arrivals. So far, no amount of explanation to correct false impressions has made much difference; not the argument that the numbers are tiny beside our annual immigration intake; neither that, under the refugee convention, which even Tony Abbott has not advocated abrogating, people are not acting illegally by coming to Australia and asking for asylum; nor that the real illegal arrivals are the 50,000 or more who stay in Australia, often for years, after their visas run out.

The government looks to be floundering on this issue. It is trying to buy time, hoping that the number of boat arrivals start falling, if not because of improved conditions in Sri Lanka and, perhaps, in Afghanistan, then because of the deterrent effect of the increase in the applications from boatpeople it is rejecting.

If it receives a year or so of breathing space then it may pull off some kind of international agreement to process asylum-seekers in East Timor or elsewhere in the region. But these seem like long shots.
Either the government has to change the terms of the debate, in which case Gillard had better get on with it and make the arguments, such as those above, in speech after speech and media appearance after media appearance, or she will be drawn further down the path of harsh measures, even at the cost of a rift with the Greens. Such a step would have nothing to do with good policy-making, as Koser makes clear.
Despite the opposition's success in convincing most Australians that it is Labor's softening of policy that has caused the increase in the number of boats, he points to a clear "push" factor: an increase of 45 per cent in asylum applications from Afghanistan to developed countries between 2008 and 2009. These, he says, are "clearly related to deterioration in the security and human rights situation there".
The civil war in Sri Lanka is the other main reason for the increase in boat arrivals in recent years and the war's end is the main reason they stopped.
According to the latest guidelines on Afghanistan released by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees a week ago, the situation has only got worse in parts of the country, with 5978 civilians killed and injured in 2009, the highest since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and 3268 in the first six months of 2010.
The country guidance note issued by immigration to help determine refugee applications acknowledges that Taliban attacks have increased. But it relies on reports of a relatively stable situation in parts of the country populated by the ethnic minority Hazara, who comprise most of the Afghans who apply for asylum in Australia, to justify an increase in the rejection rate for Afghans from close to 100 per cent to as low as 23 per cent at one point this year.
After appeals, about 50 per cent have been accepted as refugees in recent times.
The integrity of the refugee process relies on rejecting claims that do not meet the convention criteria of people with a well-founded fear of persecution or death. But according to refugee experts, the government has swung from giving too many Hazara the benefit of the doubt to rejecting claims that probably are genuine. The immigration department report refers to incidents this year such as the Taliban capturing Hazara as alleged spies and beheading others.
Stopping the boats is a good idea, reinforced by last week's Christmas Island tragedy, but not at any cost. A sufficiently harsh detention regime may do so, for a period, but at the cost of irreparably damaging the lives of innocent people, as the legacy of the Howard government's policies amply demonstrates and as the Gillard government's approach increasingly threatens to do.
Koser says that restrictions on asylum in Europe had the unintended consequence of pushing more asylum-seekers into the hands of people smugglers. That also has been the experience here. The temporary protection visas introduced by the Howard government and which an Abbott government would re-introduce, included bans on family reunions, leading to an increase in women and children coming by boat.
Earlier this year, the government quietly increased the intake of refugees processed by the UNHCR in Indonesia from the recent average of 80 a year to 500. The logic was sound - giving people an alternative to coming by boat - but, as so often has been the case with this government, the execution has been poor.

The UNHCR long ago submitted 500 names to Australia but most are still waiting for the outcome of security checks by an overstretched ASIO. Some have lost patience and taken their chances with people smugglers. Over the past 12-18 months, an estimated 170 to 190 people throughout Southeast Asia assessed as refugees by UNHCR have taken a boat to Australia, rather than keep waiting.

Another reason that more are coming by boat may be the increasing resources Australia has put into screening at overseas airports, targeting those nationalities most likely to apply for asylum. The same logic that says boatpeople should wait their turn behind more needy people languishing in camps should apply to those who come by air. Yet it is a point that is never made by those demanding action to stop the boats.

We have to keep reminding ourselves that, as a nation, we have chosen to take refugees, with all the political inconvenience that can cause.

We should face up to our obligations, including to those who land on our doorstep.