In a rare public interview, former prime minister Julia Gillard has defended her government's asylum seeker policies, saying she supported offshore processing for "humanitarian" reasons.

Ms Gillard appeared on Al Jazeera's UpFront program as chair of the Global Partnership on Education — a program that aims to help the world's poorest children access schooling.

But the interview — which was tense at times — soon turned to discussions on why the former Gillard Government re-opened the Nauru and Manus Island detention centres in 2012.

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Ms Gillard admitted while her government took a hardline approach to asylum seekers, Australian leaders needed to deal with the "reality" of the people smuggling trade.

She told host Mehdi Hasan under her reign, the Australian Government was "generous" in its increased places for refugees and she stood by the decisions she made, spurred on by a goal of stopping people from making the dangerous journey.

Mr Hasan quickly drilled down on Australia's moves to deal with asylum seekers arriving by boat.

"Up to 1,000 people are believed to have died trying to come to Australia by boat over the past decade," he said.

"And yet many of your critics say that you as prime minister were no different to your conservative predecessors or successors in trying to turn away those asylum seekers who were trying to reach Australia."

Ms Hasan said the Gillard Government's measures rendered the market for people smugglers more profitable.

Ms Gillard was quick to defend herself and her former government.

"We do not want people taking that journey and running those risks," she said.

"You don't quite know what it's like as prime minister to get the telephone call... from your defence forces that tell you that they suspect that an asylum seeker boat has gone down."

And when Ms Gillard was questioned about the high number of refugee children who were detained under her government, she dismissed the criticism as a "snapshot of history".

Under Tony Abbott's coalition government, hardline measures on asylum seekers were adopted based on refusing Australian resettlement for any boat arrivals.

Labor now backs that approach.