Labor's great policy disaster revealed to the world Indonesian marines carry an asylum seeker who was rescued from a troubled boat which was adrift trying to reach Australia. FIRST we were told we had too few boat people to worry about. Now we've got too many to stop. This is Labor's greatest policy disaster. And not just because it's cost more than 1000 lives and billions of dollars. It has also corrupted our immigration program, damaged national security, overwhelmed charities and endangered public safety. Prime Minister Julia Gillard herself designed the new "compassionate" border laws that in 2008 replaced the tough ones that had cut boat arrivals to an average of only three a year. Two years later Gillard was still pooh-poohing warnings that Labor had opened the door to illegal immigration. "The number of asylum seekers arriving by boat to Australia is very, very minor," she scoffed. It would take about 20 years to fill the MCG with asylum seekers at present rates of arrival. Except, of course, millions of people in poorer lands were learning - on their computers or televisions - what a soft touch Labor was. Many got to their feet. When Gillard spoke, we were already getting 5000 boat people a year. This financial year, we're about to reach 25,000. That would fill the MCG not in 20 years but four, and the rate of arrivals continues to rise. More than 100 people a day have landed over the past two months and this week two boats with largely African passengers arrived for the first time. The word has spread. The cost is not just in dollars and lives. For a start, the immigration program has been trashed and no longer operates in the national interest. Our refugee intake was once limited to 13,750 arrivals a year - people we chose ourselves. The Gillard Government has now raised that to 20,000 - largely from countries effectively nominated by the boat people. It did that to help hide its disaster and because it had a bizarre notion that if it let more refugees fly here, fewer might come by boat. As Immigration Department secretary Martin Bowles explained on Monday: "The greatest thing to confirm to people who are coming irregularly (is) that there is another mechanism for them to get here. We are confident that we will reach the 20,000 target this year, with significant increases of people, particularly out of the Middle East region. There is no sign this fly-don't-sail strategy is working, but it also raises a question politicians don't want to debate: How well will Muslims from this violent and tribal part of the world settle here? Hasn't the boat people fiasco forced the Government to bring in more refugees of the kind that seem to struggle most with fitting in? In fact, the head of ASIO confirms the boats have already brought in 58 people (from both the Middle East and Sri Lanka) deemed a threat to our security. David Irvine said vetting asylum seekers now took a "very considerable allocation of the organisation's resources," yet mistakes still get made - not surprisingly, when ASIO is so stretched that more than 10,000 boat people have been released into the community without a full screening. An Egyptian boat person wanted by Interpol for alleged terrorism offences spent almost a year in a low-security immigration facility before ASIO figured who he was and an alleged Sri Lankan murderer was released on a bridging visa last September. Then there's this question: is it fair on Australians to bring in more such refugees or boat people if they are deemed by our officials to be too "traumatised" to properly control themselves or to be punished in full? Take Afghan refugee Esmatullah Sharifi, who raped two Melbourne women in 2008, but this week had his sentenced slashed on appeal on the grounds that he suffered from "a post-traumatic stress disorder, as a result of (his) experiences in Afghanistan." Still, we can hardly blame boat people if some turn to theft. Those released into the community are not allowed to work and must survive on only $220 a week. Charities set up to help Australians say they are being overwhelmed by boat people, essentially imported beggars. The Gillard Government's boat people policies are a financial, humanitarian and social disaster. But they have also created an industry now so deeply entrenched that even an Abbott government will struggle to shut it down.