CANBERRA: Forget tax cuts, new spending or the usual election sweeteners. Conservative Australian Prime Minister John Howard may win most of his votes at the Nov 10 election just by holding a firm line against illegal immigration.

A flow of mostly Muslim boat people to Australia, and fears fed by the government that suicide bombers and militants could be hidden among them, promises to be one of the factors dominating the ballot and bolstering the government’s re-election chances.

Howard, trying to win a third term for his conservative coalition, has seen his popularity soar in the wake of a tough new policy against mostly Middle Eastern and Afghan boatpeople, tapping into growing popular sentiment against the arrivals.

While the government lagged far behind opposition Labour early in the year, the tide turned in August when Howard sent crack troops in battle fatigues aboard a Norwegian freighter to stop 433 boat people it had rescued from swimming ashore.

The government’s unprecedented decision to turn away the freighter, the Tampa and a similar hard line against about five other boats carrying about 1,000 mostly Muslim illegal immigrants since, won back conservative voters in droves.

The asylum seekers have been loaded onto navy vessels and shipped to the tiny Pacific Island of Nauru to be processed, under a controversial deal struck between Australia and cash-strapped Nauru to take the immigrants off Canberra’s hands.

A delay by opposition Labour in backing a package of new anti-illegal immigrant legislation cost the opposition dearly, and Labour now lags the government by eight per cent in opinion polls.

Analysts said that the issue will percolate throughout the campaign, with one rejected boatload of 262 illegal immigrants still on its way to Nauru and another 350 or so discovered over the weekend on their way to Australia’s remote Indian Ocean outpost of Christmas Island.

Social researchers say the public resentment of boat people may be a reflection of growing “Islamophobia”. Previously, illegal immigration involved mainly Asians. Now, they are Iraqis, Iranians and Afghans, cultures many Australians are unfamiliar with.

The reluctance of some of the asylum seekers to get off the navy ship in Nauru inflamed anti-immigrant sentiment further. “If the people involved themselves continue to prove difficult for the government to deal with, I think that will make it a lot easier for the government to make capital out of the issue,” University of Queensland analyst Clive Bean said. “It will tend to play into the hands of the government.”

More than 9,000 illegal immigrants have arrived in Australia in the past two years, fleeing religious persecution and war. While the flow is a trickle by international standards, Australia’s policy of mandatory detention of the migrants for the duration of their application process, which often takes years, has put pressure on the nation’s resources.

Frequent riots and unrest in the desolate camps has also topped the news in recent months, spurring the anti-immigration mood among Australia’s 19 million population and pushing the issue to the top of Howard’s election campaign agenda. Defence Minister Peter Reith was swift to warn that illegal immigration could be a “pipeline for terrorists”. At the same time, Labour’s delayed support of the tough new policy has left its supporters deflated — some disappointed with the harsh stand, others angered by the delay. —Reuters