Looks like some have to consider the following before voting Labor after these statement.

Mr Shorten said a future Labor government would adopt the boat turn-back policy but he also vowed to nearly double Australia’s refugee intake to 27,000, improve conditions at offshore detention centres and give more money to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to support its work in the region.

BUT this from one of his party.
Mr Albanese said his party now had a “comprehensive” solution to the asylum seeker problem and does not believe a future Labor government will need to turn back any boats at sea.

“I don’t believe [turn-backs] will start,” he said.

“Everyone in Labor wants to make sure there aren’t turn-backs because there aren’t boats.”

Also - Labor deputy leader Tanya Plibersek and frontbencher Penny Wong also voted with the left, to ban boat turn-backs, that's right open the floodgates.

If Labor win any money says the boats will start immediately, Shorten says he will turn back boats, reminds me of NO carbon tax and many other pre-election promises by politicians.

Australia’s population is already too high now. There are too many people on welfare, with our per capita income shrinking as it always does with high immigration; immigrants are the only winners. Wages are stagnant, but prices are still rising. Multiculturalism has stymied integration and self-reliance. The dogma that all cultures are equal and can co-exist in one country is nonsense. Australia must be more discerning and stop all immigration at least until there are no longer 750,000 unemployed already here.

Kudos to Ericc, Bazz, Philip S, especially ttbn.

//They also know that their rival party has the exact same policy so that leaves voters looking for an alternative that doesn't have the resources or history to make a significant impact.//

Added to that is the problem that left-leaning voters who are concerned about overpopulation don't really have anywhere to turn, because the anti-immigration parties have an unfortunate xenophobic streak. When they say 'there's too many people coming into this country, we should decrease it significantly...', I'm all ears. Unfortunately they usually tend to continue 'so we should ban all Arabs/Africans/Asians/whoever the flavour of the month is', at which point they lose me and presumably a good many other voters who aren't in favour of that sort of crap.

If they're actually serious about reducing the number of people coming in, the dog-whistling is a terrible political strategy because it turns the voters off in droves. If a centrist party whose platform simply involves decreasing the overall number of immigrants to something more manageable, without any of the xenophobic rhetoric we hear from the likes of our Pauline and her ever-dwindling band of merry morons, I think they'd probably do quite well. But it looks like the anti-immigration parties are more interested in clinging steadfastly to their bigotry than achieving the stated goal of reducing immigration. Hey, what can you do?

Toni Lavis on the mark....

Interesting article. The author busts some of the myths associated with high immigration. It's obvious that politicians will quote growth in GDP rather than growth in per capita GDP, since growth in per capita GDP is often negligible. As so often, anyone who is sceptical is accused of racism, because those who favor high immigration really can't offer a justification on economic or social terms.

There are two questions that are never answered "What is the optimum rate of population growth?" and "Is, for example, a 10% rate twice as beneficial as a 5% rate?"