AustLit

'Asylum seeker and immigration policies have been major political issues over the last 20 years in Australian society. This topic has risen to particular prominence in Queensland since the rise of Pauline Hanson and the One Nation Party, who have warned about and argued against immigration in all its forms – first concerned about Asian immigration in the late 1990s but pivoting towards the Middle East in more recent years. Australia has seen a considerable rise in asylum claims and arrivals by boat, linked to the coalition invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s and the Syrian Civil War more recently. General xenophobia and a tendency to conflate Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan with terrorism have resulted in support for Australia’s harsh and dubiously legal asylum policies.' (Introduction)