WHEN Kevin Rudd became Australia's prime minister almost two years ago, many thought they had heard the last loud discords about asylum-seekers landing on Australia's northern shores. But a recent increase in numbers of boat people has reignited the issue. This is straining Mr Rudd's pledge to soften the former conservative government's hard edge towards asylum-seekers. It is also testing Australia's relations with Indonesia.

In Jakarta this week for the inauguration of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Mr Rudd persuaded Indonesia's president to accept 78 Sri Lankans for processing in the country. Australian authorities had rescued them from a boat between Sumatra and Christmas Island, an Australian territory. A week earlier, to oblige Mr Rudd, Indonesia's navy intercepted a boat with 250-odd Sri Lankans heading for Australia. Now moored in West Java, its passengers are refusing to disembark. Australia has now offered Indonesia more help to deal with boat people.

In 2001 John Howard, Mr Rudd's predecessor, exploited public anxieties about boat people when he ordered troops to board a Norwegian freighter, the Tampa, to stop it bringing 430 rescued asylum-seekers to Australia. His Labor government last year ditched other harsh Howard measures. Mr Rudd's mantra is “tough but humane”.

Now in opposition, Mr Howard's old political allies are shrilly blaming Mr Rudd for the boats' reappearance. A year ago only about 200 people were being held in immigration detention centres. By early this month there were 1,270, most on Christmas Island, where boat people are processed. Yet the rise also coincides with a growth of people fleeing conflicts in Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, which account for almost three-quarters of Australia's detainees. And the numbers are tiny compared with the 14,000 “unlawful non-citizens” who, authorities say, melted into Australia in 2007-08 after arriving by air and overstaying visas.

Nonetheless, Mr Rudd's approaches to Indonesia have a populist impulse: the fears, long embedded in the Australian psyche, of swarms of arrivals in the country's north. An opinion poll this month by the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based think-tank, found 76% of people are concerned about asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat.

Relations with Indonesia have rarely been better. But there is another sensitive issue: Australian police's recent decision to reopen the case of the “Balibo Five”, Australia-based journalists whom Indonesian troops murdered during their invasion of East Timor 34 years ago. Winning Jakarta's co-operation on both this, and clamping down on people smugglers may be tricky.