They worked shoulder to shoulder on this until a couple of years ago. Nearly every tough new strategy, from mandatory detention in 1992 to the blocking of the Tampa in 2001, had bipartisan support. Both sides used the damning rhetoric of "queue jumpers" and "illegals"; no leader of either side ever stood up for boat people, and none has called in any effective way for calm on this issue. Over the years, spats and quibbles over ways and means have broken out. But never until now has an opposition launched an all-out assault on a government's handling of the boats. What happened first under Malcolm Turnbull's leadership, and now under Tony Abbott's, is new: a new rancour and a new determination to use the boats to beat a government.
Both Labour and the Coalition have had ample opportunities in the past. When unprecedented numbers of boats suddenly appeared over the horizon in 1999 - 86 boats carrying 3700 asylum seekers - Kim Beazley did not lash John Howard for losing control of the borders. He deplored the extreme language of some ministers and called for a coastguard to patrol the north.
Ten years ago this week, under pressure from One Nation, Howard blocked the Tampa and deployed the navy to force boats back to Indonesia. A policy he had had deplored only weeks before as uncivilised was now a national objective to be pursued in the face of a controversy which - in the fortnight before the September 11 attacks - caught the world's attention.
This might have been a time for Labour to break with the Coalition over the boats. But after 25 years of singing essentially the same song, Labour was in no position to sell a fresh policy in the weeks before the 2001 elections. The party was deeply split between progressives, who found these policies abhorrent, and conservatives, who saw them as a mark of core Australian values. A battered Labour Party went along with Howard. There would always be reservations about the ''Pacific solution'', but essentially the old political alliance held. Instead of attacking each other, both sides would train their fire on the boats, boat people and people smugglers.
Australia's passion to stop boat arrivals reached an extraordinary pitch at this time. Roy Morgan conducted a poll in several countries in September 2001 to measure support for the proposition that all refugee boats should be "put back to sea". Support in the US was 25 per cent; in New Zealand 43 per cent; in Britain 45 per cent; but in Australia it was almost off the dial at 68 per cent.
Howard was adamant this had nothing to do with race. It is another bipartisan claim made by all political sides since that first Vietnamese boat appeared in Darwin harbour and Malcolm Fraser sent officers to sabotage boats along the Malaysian coast to make sure as few as possible followed. "I don't find, as I move around the community, people expressing racist sentiments about the illegal immigrants at all," Howard said at the height of the Tampa crisis.
He reckoned the nation would be just as keen to stop boats full of "white or Japanese, or North American" asylum seekers as these Afghans and Iraqis. "It is a question of protecting our borders." That claim doesn't sit easily with the polls. Using data from the 2001 Australian Election Study, Macquarie University professor Murray Goot and his associate Tim Sowerbutts found opposition to the boats was driven by those who saw boat people as rule breakers and by those who were hostile to their ethnicity.
"The popular rejection of asylum seekers is a product of both sets of values: for the most part, opposition to immigration, especially from the Middle East, and opposition to Aboriginal land rights; but also a concern about crime and the need for harsher punishments, including the re-introduction of the death penalty," they reported.
Decades of abuse by both sides of politics have, naturally, left Australians with a low view of boat people. A June 2010 poll for the Scanlon Foundation found that less than a third of us believe they are fleeing persecution or fear for their lives. A Lowy Institute poll this year found that 88 per cent of Australians believe they are queue jumpers and 86 per cent believe they "pose a potential security threat to Australia". Poll after poll over the years shows most of us wildly overestimate their numbers.
Even so, mainstream Australia does not want to shut out boat people. Except in the wild panic whipped up over the Tampa, most Australians have thought it best to allow most of them to land here. Clear from polls going back to the late 1970s, this view was confirmed last week in a Nielsen poll that showed 53 per cent of us believe boat people should have their claims for refugee protection processed here. But the everlasting politics of the boats does not play to that constituency. What counts, and always has done, are those who most fear the boats. Polls over the years suggest they comprise only about a third of us, but a crucial third. They live in marginal seats and their passion about the boats makes them ready to swap sides. Who is the best to handle the boats, is a crucial political question.
The fundamental alliance of the Coalition and Labour survived Howard's fall in 2007 and Kevin Rudd's reforms to the system in 2008. Under Brendan Nelson, the opposition ticked off on the changes - even the abolition of the ''Pacific solution'' - but under Turnbull they began to regret this. Half a dozen boats arrived in 2008. There was political advantage here.
But it meant, for the first time, an opposition mounting a sustained attack on the government. Turnbull hesitated for a while, but by the end of 2009 - when nearly 3000 asylum seekers arrived and Christmas Island burst at the seams - Turnbull was calling for the return of temporary protection visas. The clock was to be turned back. From December that year, the new opposition leader put into high gear what had already begun an assault on Labour for losing control of the borders. Abbott demanded the return of the ''Pacific solution''. All the old language was brought back into play: of queue jumpers and illegals and invasion. His argument was - and is - that every boat brought to Christmas Island represents proof of Labour's loss of control. Australia is in peril.
And Abbott has Tampa on his side. The great inheritance of the crisis is that his side of politics did what both sides have wanted to do for the past 35 years: stop the boats. Exactly how and why the boats stopped so suddenly at the end of 2001 doesn't matter politically. What does matter is that the border control constituency of Australia believes it can be done again - and that achieving that goal can justify policies we might otherwise find absolutely distasteful.
So today, 10 years after Tampa, a Labour government will be defending, in the High Court, a scheme to send 800 boat people into limbo in Malaysia. After that they'll start filling Manus Island in Papua New Guinea with refugees. The fundamentals haven't changed: whatever most of us might want, Labour and the Coalition are as determined as ever to play to the fearful and do what it takes to stop those boats.
Immigration Lawyer in Sydney Mr. Christopher Levingston stresses that if our politicians cannot understand our legal obligations under international laws, we will fail the refugees.
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