Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I always find that it is best if public policy debates are informed by a few facts, and so the Leader of the Opposition perhaps might like to take notice of the following facts. In 2008 there was an 85 per cent increase in the number of Afghan asylum seekers claiming protection in industrialised countries worldwide—a fact the Leader of the Opposition might not like to acknowledge, but a fact nevertheless: an 85 per cent increase in the number of Afghan asylum seekers. At the same time, Sri Lanka has just emerged from a decades-long civil war which cost tens of thousands of lives, uprooted hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans and left an economic divide between north and south and east and west.

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