Asylum debate
John Howard's immigration policy was neatly encapsulated by a single sound-bite. It was delivered two days before the 2001 federal election, before journalists at the National Press Club. "I yield to nobody in my determination to maintain the absolute right of Australia to decide who comes here and the circumstances in which they come," he said.
The backdrop to those comments, of course, was the Tampa crisis in August, when Mr Howard dispatched Australian special forces to board a freighter at sea to block 439 mainly Afghan refugees from entering Australia's territorial waters. 
The MV Tampa, a Norwegian vessel, had rescued the refugees from a distressed fishing vessel in international waters. But Alexander Downer, the then foreign affairs minister, announced that "Australia has no obligation under international law to accept the rescued into Australian waters".
Legally, Downer claimed to be applying the strict letter of international law. But it was the Howard government's moral stance that drew international criticism from human rights groups.
Afterwards, the Howard government instituted what became known as the Pacific Solution, where asylum seekers were transported to detention camps on small islands in the Pacific Ocean, Nauru and Manus Island. They were sent there whatever the merits of their claims, and whatever level of persecution they were trying to flee. The claims for asylum were processed while they were kept under lock and key.
In October that year, the asylum issue flared again when the Howard government claimed that illegal immigrants on board a vessel intercepted 100 nautical miles north of Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean had thrown children overboard - a claim a subsequent Senate inquiry found to be untrue.
In the 2001 election, John Howard's Liberal-led coalition won an increased majority. By contrast, Labor's share of the primary vote slumped to a 67-year low. John Howard's hardline stance on asylum seekers arguably won him the election. Fears about the dangers posed by foreign outsiders had already been stocked by the attacks of 9/11. These overlapping issues of national security and border security revived the government's fortunes. For much of the year, it had been trailing in the polls. Labor had been "wedged" on the question of asylum seekers.
During last year's election, Kevin Rudd promised to end the Pacific Solution, arguably a brave political stance for a party that had suffered in the past from being labelled weak on border security.
Back in February, the new Labor government made good that promise - effectively dismantling the Pacific Solution, when a group of 21 Sri Lankan asylum seekers were flown off Nauru.
Now the new Rudd government has gone further in its overhaul of asylum policy by ending the practice of jailing all asylum seekers - a mandatory policy, which in fairness to the Howard government, was instituted by the Labor government of the 1990s. Similarly, children will no longer be detained in an immigration detention centre.
The Australian government's detention centre on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean will remain open, and the government reserves the right to detain some people arriving by boat - mainly as a deterrent to people smugglers. But, crucially, the onus will be on immigration officials to justify why they pose a risk that requires confinement.
Some will regard this as a moral corrective, similar in spirit and application to the apology to Aboriginal Australians for past injustices and the decision to ratify Kyoto. Certainly, it marks another definitive break from the recent past.
Others will claim that it has weakened Australia's border community. This was the response from Senator Chris Ellison, the opposition immigration spokesman: "We have to have a strong immigration policy and legal system which says, 'If you come to Australia and you have no right to be here then you either return from whence you came or your matter is resolved, and whilst that is being done, Australia has the right to detain you'".
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