Australia's off-shore processing policy towards asylum seekers arriving by boat is 20 years old this week.

Over that time, the policy has often been credited with "stopping the boats", so much so that other countries over the years have been inspired to try to copy it.

But did off-shore processing really stop the boats?

Today on The Signal, with a new refugee crisis brewing in Afghanistan, we look at how our off-shore asylum seeker system actually works, and ask why the Government seems to talk about it less and less.

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Madeline Gleeson, Senior Research Associate, Andrew and Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, University of New South Wales, Sydney