It's gathering dusk at Christmas Island's Flying Fish Cove. A father stands tall and strong on his paddleboard, his infant cross-legged on the board behind him. A family of Christmas Island locals swims below the jetty; beaming dad hoisting the baby and her mother fully dressed in her hijab, her loose cotton clothing flowing behind her. Above, immigration authorities, Serco officials and the Australian Federal Police unload yet another boatload of asylum seekers. So common has the sight become that no one below glances up to the jetty in curiosity.

The faces of those who step from the navy boats ferrying them to shore from Indonesian fishing vessels on the horizon are strained. One man is helped onto the jetty. His leg is missing below the knee. Others carry babies. The frail and elderly are helped into wheelchairs to make the short journey to the buses waiting to take them to detention centres.

From up close, the sight recalls Emma Lazarus' The New Colossus, the poem to welcome the millions of immigrants to Ellis Island in New York, engraved in bronze at the base of the Statue of Liberty. ''Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.''

But times and attitudes have changed. Since the Hawke government refused to give refugee status to 600 mainly Cambodian boat people who arrived in Australia in 1989, Australian sentiment to those who seek to come to our shores without invitation has been lukewarm.

Between Julia Gillard's announcement in August that Australia would accept all recommendations of the Houston ''expert'' panel on asylum seekers, and now, more than 13,000 people have made the journey to Australia by boat. Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison says fewer than one in 20 asylum seekers making the trip by boat will end up in Nauru or Manus Island's tropical detention centres, which were established as deterrents. There is little doubt now that the policy designed to stop people risking their lives at sea has been an abject failure.