Labor policy key to reduced boats: Burke

Former immigration minister Tony Burke says any reduction in the number of boat arrivals is because of Labor's hardline regional resettlement policy introduced before the election.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Saturday said the arrival of asylum seekers by boat had dropped dramatically since the election of the coalition government.

But while he said they hadn't stopped completely, he expressed confidence reduced numbers were arriving.

"I can say to you with great confidence, they are stopping," Mr Abbott said.

But Mr Burke, the minister responsible for introducing the Rudd government's policy of sending boat arrivals to PNG or Nauru for resettlement, said that plan is responsible for the reduction, not coalition policy.

"They haven't changed our policy. They've changed the media strategy around it, they've changed the secrecy around it, but there is not one part of the policy that we put in place with the regional resettlement arrangements that they've shifted," Mr Burke told Sky News on Sunday.

"They've haven't gone around boats and turned them back. They haven't to my knowledge gone through Indonesian fishing villages buying boats. What they've been doing is implementing the regional resettlement arrangements and they work."

However, the Labor MP said it would be "churlish" of him not to credit the coalition with implementing the resettlement plan.

"They are implementing it. There are ways you can wreck it," he said.

The newly appointed manager of opposition business said he was confident Labor would stick with the hardline policy despite divisions within the party on refugees.

"The big shift in people's thinking happened when we saw the extraordinary number of drownings," Mr Burke said.

"At that moment I think people started to recognise that having ... what you might describe as a hardline policy wasn't a situation of showing lets show how tough we are, it's actually a compassionate thing to do."