Boat people carry a real threat to Gillard

The boatloads of asylum seekers crowding Australia's detention centres are settling firmly around the neck of Prime Minister Julia Gillard, as her border defences and diplomatic initiatives continue to crumble.

Gillard's proposal for a regional processing centre failed to make it to this week's people-smuggling summit in Bali, and East Timor continues to resist her efforts to establish a centre in the tiny island nation.

Her failure to set up an offshore alternative to the now-defunct "Pacific solution" camps built in Papua New Guinea and Nauru by former Prime Minister John Howard's conservative Government have added serious weight to Gillard's dilemma.

Despite an air and sea barrier cast across the Indian Ocean approaches to the continent, and improved intelligence and co-operation with Indonesia, asylum seekers continue to be intercepted in Australian waters.

And a coronial hearing in Perth has been told of gaps in sophisticated surveillance systems that allowed a boat to evade detection and destroy itself on rocks off Christmas Island, killing about 50 people. For Gillard's fragile minority Government, the boats carry a real political threat.

Although the numbers of people arriving from Indonesia in often barely seaworthy vessels is small in comparison with others who arrive by air and overstayers, the boats carry powerful and emotive political baggage.

In December a News Ltd online poll - made shortly after the tragedy off Christmas Island's Flying Fish Cove - found 85 per cent of about 10,000 respondents believed asylum seekers should not be allowed to stay. In July a Morgan Poll reported that 64 per cent of respondents wanted asylum seekers to be sent home.

The Opposition has also been steadily hammering Gillard, claiming that her policies have eroded Howard's hard line and encouraged people smugglers to send more boats to sea. The flow of boats slowed to a trickle after Howard clamped down, but resumed when the most draconian of his policies were overturned after Labor's 2007 election victory.

But there is also powerful opposition to Gillard's policies - especially compulsory detention and her proposed East Timorese facility - and any attempt to ramp up countermeasures would be met with outrage.

Labor has maintained a tough stand, maintaining compulsory detention, tightening policies and continuing a major surveillance and interception operation co-ordinated by the Border Protection Command. This involves air force AP-3C Orion patrol aircraft, patrol boats, Customs aircraft and a range of other measures, including the Jindalee over-the-horizon radar system, capable of monitoring even small boats over 37,000sq km of ocean, 3000km out from the mainland.

But the boats keep coming: 13 so far this year.

Gillard's position was not helped by the revelation this week that no one was watching for boats off Christmas Island when one crashed into the rocks of Flying Fish Cove.

Border Protection Commander Rear-Admiral Tim Barrett told Perth Coroner Alastair Hope that the resident patrol boat was sheltering from heavy seas in the lee of the island, obscuring its radar, and no shore lookout had been posted. The Jindalee radar was not operating at the time.

Inside the camps, anger is growing at overcrowding and the length of time taken for refugee claims to be processed. Detainees have rioted and broken free on Christmas Island, and protested at other centres.

Six people have died in detention in the past seven months and there have beenmore than 180 incidents of self-harm in the past eight months.