Australia is a nation built on waves of immigration, but the current spate is proving to be the most difficult and divisive. Perhaps undeservedly, the country has acquired a reputation for harsh treatment of the thousands of desperate people coming to its vast coastline from international hellholes such as Afghanistan.

It has a mandatory detention policy for illegal arrivals, and last December the conservative-hued government produced a White Paper outlining its proposals to crack down further on the unwanted influx from the north.

More resources are being allocated to the military and the federal police for surveillance and apprehension of unofficial refugees. Meanwhile, unscrupulous people-traffickers in Indonesia and Thailand are making profits out of operations that can be as simple as hiring a rusty old boat and loading poor families on to them.

Loads of "boat people" sailed on the stormy waters of the South China and Arafura seas to get to Australia in the mid to late 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam War. An estimated 1.3 million fled the war-ravaged country in this way. Their arrival in Australia was treated with a mixture of indifference, pity and outright racism. Geoffrey Blainey, a leading historian (and originator of the phrase "black armband view of history" which was seized by Prime Minister John Howard as his rationalisation for not apologising to the Aboriginal people for the wrongs done to them) gave respectability to the new racism in 1984 when he warned that immigration from Asia was undesirable. It is against this background that the current generation in power is dealing with a much more widespread flood of refugees into a country which seems incredibly tempting: vast, rich and mostly empty.

The last wave, in the late 1990s, was from China. But the predominant nationalities seeking refuge in Australia now are, surprisingly, Afghan and Iraqi people.

They come via Indonesia, paying an average of £4,000 a head to often unscrupulous traffickers (generally not Australian residents) who usually dump them somewhere quiet, far from cities, on the northern coast. Anyone who is apprehended by the authorities (as most are) and cannot supply a valid entry permit is held in a detention centre while their circumstances are checked, to establish whether they are genuine humanitarian refugees or "economic" refugees looking for a better lifestyle.

Hopeful arrivals have to meet the migration criteria of the day, which are established to meet Australia's national interest and needs, according to the Department of Immigration.

The detention centres in which they're held increasingly resemble prisons, with 12-metre high metal fences around them.

What is dividing Australia's multicultural society is the question of the country's responsibility for looking after people who arrive uninvited from harsh regimes. This year's resurgence in the fortunes of Pauline Hanson, the extremist redhead Queenslander who had initial success with her white supremacist One Nation party two years ago, shows renewed support for her attacks on the government for supplying food and lodging to these new arrivals, while many ordinary Australians, especially in the rural sector, have experienced prolonged poor fortune. Hanson's party polled respectably in recent state elections in Queensland and Western Australia, showing it is far from a spent force.

In January, the Australian Minister for Justice, Amanda Vanstone, told a conference on people-trafficking in the capital, Canberra, that every illegal arrival cost the taxpayer £20,000.

In the 12 months from mid-1999 to 2000, 5,868 people were known to have arrived illegally, mostly by sea. Vanstone said that crime rings which had previously concentrated on drugs were now turning to people-smuggling, because of the law enforcement heat on drugs and the easy money to be made from fleecing those desperate to get away from ghastly living conditions.

However, the detention centres many of them are sent to in Australia might not be a lot better. Some of these are pleasant enough (such as the one shown to the Taoiseach on his visit to Australia last year), but others are former military premises in truly godforsaken locations such as the Woomera rocket range in the outback of south Australia, and Port Hedland in the far north of Western Australia.

There was severe rioting at Woomera last year, where enraged refugees burned down the recreation hall and library provided for them.