Coalition
- Heavily regulate migration, with a strong emphasis on money and skills.
- Wind back allocation for family reunion and humanitarian entrants.
- Maintain a cap on overall migration, with the effect of around 1% overall population increase per year.
- Punish and deter those who try to migrate or seek refuge outside the "proper channels", including mandatory detention without trial and temporary second-class visas for refugees who enter "illegally".
Labor
- Has no substantial differences from the Coalition.
- Keep mandatory detention. Punish asylum seekers who arrive unauthorised.
- Ensure Australia's immigration intake reflects the needs of business.
- Establish an Office of Population Policy.
- Establish stronger links with Indonesia, and greater regional cooperation, to solve the issue of people smuggling and unauthorised arrivals.
- Appoint a Special Australian Representative to promote regional action on people smuggling, to reflect Australia's seriousness.
- Establish a Coast Guard, "a cop on the beat 52 weeks of the year".
- Increase Australia's contribution to the UN High Commission for Refugees (currently $20 million a year).
Democrats
- End mandatory detention, instead favouring reception centres to determine identity, provide health checks.
- Extend permanent residence to all those found to be refugees, oppose temporary protection visas.
- Institute community-based arrangements for asylum seekers while claims being processed.
- Remove those found not to be refugees.
- Incorporate into Australian law those international conventions which protect people from being returned to face situations of danger in their own countries.
- End two-year waiting period for social security entitlements.
- Maintain current immigration levels, but with a heavier emphasis on family reunion and humanitarian intake.
Greens
- Abolish mandatory detention.
- Abolish three-year temporary protection visas for refugees who arrive without a visa, and grant immediate permanent residence to all those currently on temporary visas.
- Institute reception centres to determine identity, provide health checks.
- Institute community-based arrangements for asylum seekers while claims are being processed.
- Broaden the term "refugee" to apply to people displaced due to famine, poverty, environmental degradation, war, political oppression and denial of human rights.
- Restructure immigration system so it is based predominantly on family reunions and other special humanitarian criteria while recognising the importance of the skilled migration category.
- End language discrimination, reject the requirement to be fluent in English.
- Grant Full access to social security, legal and interpreter services, English language classes, post-trauma counselling.
- Increase funding to immigrant service providers.
Socialist Alliance
- Close the detention centres
- End mandatory detention
- Grant full rights for asylum seekers and migrants
- Abolish the two-year waiting period which prevents newly arrived migrants accessing social security.
- Abolish temporary protection visas.
- End all deportations.
- Remove all restrictive and discriminatory immigration regulations and abolish the pro-business "points" system.
- Fund specialist services for resettlement.
- Institute unlimited and free English classes.
- Extend full citizenship rights including the right to vote to all refugees and migrants.