Since the early 1990s successive Australian governments have taken an increasingly uncompromising stance against people arriving by boat without adequate documentation.
While it is a complex task to determine a government policy on asylum seekers that will balance global humanitarian obligations with the national interest, broad public support for the government's decisions has relied heavily on four beliefs.
Following the links below, I show how our political leaders have promoted these beliefs, and bringing together publicly available facts and statistics, I argue that these beliefs are fallacies:
While you may not agree with the conclusions I draw, this document is intended to support informed discussion of the issue and encourage transparency in government decision making.
Information sources can be found in the footnotes, and the reader may refer to the Excel spreadsheets for the calculations used to construct the graphs.
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