Is Bill Shorten going to bring back the boats? Labor leader under pressure to bring 1,341 asylum seekers being held offshore to Australia within 90 DAYS if he's elected PM

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Opposition Leader Bill Shorten is under pressure from his own party to bring more than 1,300 asylum seekers to Australia within three months if Labor wins the next federal election. 

A pro-refugee group from his own Victorian branch is demanding an end to offshore immigration detention, despite such a policy causing a dramatic surge in boat arrivals when Labor was last in government and the deaths of 48 people at Christmas Island.

The motion, revealed by the Guardian Australia, called on a Labor government to 'close offshore detention centres, transit centres and other camps on Manus and Nauru within the first 90 days, and to bring all the children, women and men who are refugees or seeking asylum remaining there to Australia'. 

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten is under pressure from his own party to bring asylum seekers to Australia within three months if Labor wins the next federal election (asylum seeker boat off Christmas Island pictured)

A pro-refugee group is demanding an end to offshore immigration detention, despite such a policy causing a dramatic surge in boat arrivals when Labor was last in government (including a 2010 tragedy at Christmas Island pictured)

The cross-factional Labor for Refugees group within Mr Shorten's party is putting forward an urgency motion at this weekend's Victorian conference calling for all remaining asylum seekers to be transported to the Australian mainland within three months.

The activists are demanding an end to the detention of asylum seekers at Christmas Island, Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific island of Nauru, which would see 1,341 boat people brought to Australia.

However Bill Shorten said Labor was committed to offshore detention and clarified that state conference motions on border protection weren't binding on national policy.

'Labor's policy on asylum seekers is clear – we will never let the people smugglers back in business,' a spokeswoman told Daily Mail Australia today.

'Labor believes in strong borders, offshore processing, regional resettlement and turnbacks when safe to do so because we know it saves lives at seas.

'Resettlement in Australia for those on Manus and Nauru is not an option.'

When Labor last won an election from Opposition a decade ago, it immediately ended the Howard government's Pacific solution.

This led to a surge in boat arrivals, rising from just three in the 2007/08 financial year, to 117 in 2009/10.

Or put another way, the number of asylum seekers surged from 25 to 5,327, figures from a Parliament House research paper showed.

The end of offshore detention under Labor coincided with the death of 48 people, mainly asylum seekers from Iran and Iraq, as their boat sunk off Christmas Island in 2010

Bill Shorten (left) is facing pressure from within his own Labor branch to end offshore detention of asylum seekers, despite the policy causing a surge in asylum seeker boats

The policy change also coincided with the deaths of 48 people, mainly asylum seekers from Iran and Iraq, as their boat sunk and washed on to cliffs at Christmas Island in December 2010.

Former federal Labor leader Mark Latham described the Labor for Refugees motion as a 'sickness inside Labor'. 

'Labor For Refugees want to repeat all these errors, all those deaths,' he told his 64,892 followers on Wednesday.

'It's a tragic example of people losing their marbles in life, blindly putting ideology, a borderless world, ahead of practical policy lessons and common sense.'

Former federal Labor leader Mark Latham described the Labor for Refugees motion as a 'sickness inside Labor' that was 'blindly putting ideology' ahead of common sense

The surge of boat arrivals in 2012 led to then Labor prime minister Julia Gillard reopening the Manus Island detention centre.

Since then, seven asylum seekers have died there, including a Rohingya refugee this week.

Ms Gillard's Labor predecessor Kevin Rudd took back his old job in a party room coup in 2013 and soon declared boat people sent to Manus Island would have 'no chance' of ever being settled in Australia.

Department of Home Affairs data shows there were 330 asylum seekers detained at Christmas Island and 269 at Nauru as of March 31, 2018.

It listed a zero figure for Manus Island, however that was because the detention centre there, which previously housed 742 people, was closed down with its residents transferred to the nearby, low-security Lorengau facility.

Were Labor for Refugees motion to become government policy, 1,341 asylum seekers would be brought to Australia.

The Australian mainland is already housing 1,059 asylum seekers, including 101 in Bill Shorten's own Melbourne electorate of Maribyrnong.