Recent decades have seen issues of asylum seeking and border security feature heavily in Australian federal elections, with significant campaign time and money dedicated to the promotion of border security policies that seek to limit the number of boats carrying asylum seekers. In this article, we investigate the language of threat and the construction of asylum seekers as a âthreat to national security,â we suggest that this language can be traced to the 2001 âTampa crisis,â and that while there have been brief phases where a âhumaneâ approach to the arrival of asylum seekers was present, the asylum seeker âissueâ overall has been exploited by major political parties to generate positive election outcomes at the expense of Australia's humanitarian obligations. We argue that the current perception of Australia's border protection laws are a form of âcompassionate deterrence,â where inhumane treatment of asylum seekers is justified on the basis of âsaving lives.âRelated Articles Byrne, Jennifer. 2016. â.â Politics & Policy 44 (): 751â782. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12169/full Green, David, and Yoshihiko Kadoya. 2015. â.â Politics & Policy 43 (): 59â93. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12109/full Silverman, Stephanie J. 2012. ââ.â Politics & Policy 40 (): 1131â1157. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2012.00393.x/full