Australia may be thousands of miles from anywhere - from the European perspective - but for increasing numbers of desperate people it's the ultimate island in the sun.
Last year more than 2,000 people risked their lives and hocked their futures to people-smugglers for illicit berths on crowded vessels bound for Australia. Most were from China, Indonesia and the Middle East; all claimed to be fleeing repressive regimes or escaping political danger.
While the Australian government has been keen to tap domestic fears about the vulnerability of the country's borders to large numbers of illegal entrants, the reality is no match for the rhetoric.
Although Australia had a bumper year for boat arrivals in 1999, the total number arriving illegally over the last decade is just under 8,000.
And the Australian experience is only a tiny move on a giant international chessboard of nomadic people. According to the International Organisation for Migration, 50 million people are currently displaced from their home countries due to civil strife or wretched personal circumstances.
Australia has managed an organised refugee programme for the last 50 years, accepting 600,000 in that period. Much of the influx has been since the 1980s, when collective western guilt over the Vietnam war started a massive international Indo-Chinese refugee resettlement effort.
In the last two decades Australian governments have pursued a policy of "organised settlement" of refugees, accepting advice from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and other bodies.
"Special humanitarian" places are set aside each year for refugees from war zones, such as the 1999 hot spots of Kosovo and East Timor.
This year the government allocated 12,000 places for organised and special humanitarian refugees, out of a total immigration programme of 80,000.
But it's the treatment of would-be refugees who arrive in Australia illegally which has seen Australia's humanitarian reputation questioned.
Since its election in 1996, the conservative government led by Mr John Howard of the Liberal Party has adopted an unofficial closed-border policy, not only cutting normal migrant numbers but raising the bar in terms of the criteria against which refugee claims are measured.
Illegal immigrants are now limited in their claims for protection status in Australia. The government's position is that if they "queue-jump", they have no right to stay.
Thus Australia's six detention centres, scattered around the country, are now bursting at the seams. Last week the government announced another two would be built to house the increasing number of boat arrivals.
Run by the Immigration Department, the jail-like centres are patrolled by security guards and allow detainees limited contact with the outside world. While the department boasts that the centres are unrivalled in the provision of services, human-rights groups claim the mere fact of incarceration is an infringement of human rights.
Accusations have also been made about forcible removal and deportation involving drugging, manacling and other inhumane treatment.
The centre which the Taoiseach saw was not a detention centre, as he pointed out subsequently, but a reception centre.
At last count in March this year, 3,600 people were detained in centres awaiting assessment of their claims for protection. Some people are assessed and deported within hours; others stay for much longer.
The largest of Australia's detention centres, in remote areas of south and western Australia, have been home to hundreds for up to five years. Seventy-nine of the hundreds of children born in detention centres in the last five years still remain behind barbed-wire fences.
Australia has a buoyant refugee advocacy movement which challenges the government's hard-line stance against illegal immigrants. Last year the authorities spent $40 million in legal fees fighting court challenges against its deportation orders.