The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) this week published full year data on onshore asylum seekers in 2022-23 compared to 2022-21. The data highlights a post-pandemic high of 18,738 asylum applications in 2022-23 compared to 10,564 in 2021-22. That is still well below the record set under Peter Dutton of almost 28,000 asylum applications in 2017-18.

The major source countries were India (2,333); China (1,598); Vietnam (1,123); Indonesia (1,069); Malaysia (1,038); Tonga (795); Thailand (721); Pakistan (689); Ukraine (617) and Myanmar (614). This is very different to the situation in 2017-18 when 67% of asylum applications were from........

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