The first boat in Australian history with asylum seekers on board reached our northern coastline in April 1976. Over the next 34 years a further 24,000 boatpeople, as they came to be called, arrived. One of the most intriguing and puzzling questions of Australian politics is how so apparently minor an issue has had such an impact on our national life for such a protracted period of time. No political question has more clearly separated Australia’s ‘battlers’ from the inner-city ‘elites’. No ideological issue has more sharply divided the Left from the Right. The asylum seeker issue dominated the 2001 election. It cast its shadow across the 2010 campaign. It has blighted the careers of two Labor leaders, Kim Beazley and Kevin Rudd.