Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's election agenda focusing on jobs and growth is at risk of being hijacked by the country's harsh immigration policy and controversial network of offshore detention camps for asylum seekers.
Canberra has vowed to stop refugees sailing from Indonesia and Sri Lanka and landing on its shores, instead intercepting boats at sea and holding those on board in camps in far-flung Papua New Guinea and Nauru.
Australia goes to the polls on July 2.
Peter Young, former director of Australia's detention center network, said this week that police had accessed his phone records, in part over his criticism of the country's detention policies.
Young accused the government of attempting to cover up deaths in custody, as well as intimidating medical staff and aid workers from revealing the conditions in the camps.
The immigration and foreign ministries did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Earlier this month Australia said it had agreed to compensate a charity for wrongly accusing it of inciting refugees to self-harm in protest at conditions on Nauru in 2014.
"The thing that the government doesn't want people to know is that putting people in these situations and exposing people to these health conditions is causing them to die. If that is to be part of their plan then they should be transparent, they should make people aware of them," Young told Reuters.
"If they don't speak out, they are not behaving in a way that is ethical."
In the past month, two asylum seekers have set themselves on fire in protest against their treatment on Nauru where there have been reports of child abuse. One of them, an Iranian man, died.
Papua New Guinea has said it plans to close the Manus center after its Supreme Court ruled it unlawful, raising questions about where the refugees will be resettled.
Border security and immigration have swayed Australian elections before. The conservative government last year pledged to take 12,000 refugees from Syria on top of its 13,750 annual quota. The center-left opposition Labor Party says it would double the annual quota to 27,000.
EU has also adopted an Australian-style strategy to dismantle “the business model of people smugglers”, who take advantage of the desperate migrants to put their lives at risk by boarding unseaworthy boats.
Australian immigration policy
Australia made dramatic changes in its immigration policy in 2013 amid the growing pre-election domestic pressure to stop boats in the final months of the former Labor government led by Kevin Rudd.
The policy has been taken further by the current Liberal National coalition government, led by Tony Abbott, which effectively zeroed illegal boat arrivals and deaths, allowing the government to use its quota for the most vulnerable, instead of so-called “queue jumpers”.
The changes adopted with bi-partisan support of the two major parties made it clear that anyone who seek to enter Australia illegally by boat, under the Asylum Legacy Act, are no longer entitled to enter or stay in Australia while their refugee claims are processed.
They are transferred to Nauru or Papua New Guinea for processing, and are explained that they will not be considered for resettlement in Australia, instead given an option to return or choose to be settled in Cambodia.
The then Immigration Minister Scott Morrison described restrictions to the resettlement eligibility as "taking the sugar off the table".
The government also introduced Temporary Protection Visa's (TPV) late 2014 to specifically deal with the backlog of 30,000 asylum seekers yet to be processed left by the former government.
A TPV holding refugees are required to reapply every three years, in case conditions had changed in their homeland, making it safe for their return.
Operation Sovereign Borders included plans to raise awareness in local communities, buy back unsafe boats which would go to the hands of smugglers, work with intelligence wardens and bounty payments for useful information.
The Australian government reported that there was 0 boat arrival in 2014, compared to 300 boats with approximately 20,000 people on board arrived in 2013.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told the EU in April that stopping the boats was the only workable solution to save lives and break the business model of the people smugglers.
"The only way you can stop the deaths is to stop the people smuggling trade. The only way you can stop the deaths is in fact to stop the boats," he advised.
Despite its effectiveness to prevent deaths at sea, it is generally agreed that stopping boats don’t address the “root cause” and humanitarian side of the problem, which require closer cooperation and joint efforts of the regional governments to improve situation in the source countries.
The current tough policy is widely supported by Australian population as it appears to be the only option to stop deaths at sea.
