The revelations are contained in Mr Carr's new book, Diary of a Foreign Minister, which chronicles Labor's tortured response to the surge in asylum seekers arriving by boat, including a late but stillborn plan to get Indonesia to accept failed Iranian asylum seekers.

Mr Carr believed the government's asylum seeker policy was in disarray and he was attuned to the negative electoral effect it was having in Sydney's western suburbs.

On July 1, 2012, he called Ms Gillard's chief of staff, Ben Hubbard, to urge a change in policy on the issue.

“I favour constant movement on asylum seeker policy. Just do what Abbott proposes,” he writes.

“'Better than sitting still,' I say.”

The intervention by Mr Carr was made 14 months before Labor would go to the polls, at a time when the Malaysia Solution had fallen through and Rob Oakeshott's compromise bill on asylum seekers was rejected by an alliance of the Coalition and Greens.

The Coalition was being obstructionist because it saw rising boat people as a vote winner for the opposition, Mr Carr writes. The conduct of the Greens reminded him of Gough Whitlam's adage that “only the impotent are pure”.

“More people will die at sea as a result. And Tony Abbott will get more wind in his sails on the issue,” he writes in his diary.

As asylum seeker arrivals by boat breach 20,000 in 2013, Mr Carr fears the influx will rise to more than 50,000.

He leads the push to toughen the asylum seeker policy, claiming bluntly that those who pay people smugglers to come by sea are “economic migrants”.

“There has been a big spike, for example, in Iranians,” he writes in the diary. “They are members of the majority ethnic and religious group in Iran, who have had their living standards squeezed.”

In the dying days of her prime ministership, Ms Gillard made a last ditch bid to salvage Labor's border protection policies, with an approach to the Indonesian government to accept failed Iranian asylum seekers.

Australia would fly the Iranians back to Jakarta for their eventual repatriation to their homeland.

The proposal, hatched in June last year, was in response to Iran's refusal to accept returnees direct from Australia. It was met with scepticism by Mr Carr, given the time frame to negotiate a deal.

Even so, he was charged with letting the Indonesians know Ms Gillard would raise it directly with the country's President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, at a meeting scheduled for July 5.

By the time Mr Carr was in Jakarta to spruik the plan, Mr Rudd was prime minister. And Indonesia's Foreign Minister, Marty Natalegawa, rejected the idea of accepting planeloads of aggrieved Iranians rejected by Australia.

“Marty makes the point, an altogether reasonable one, that Indonesia can't be seen to be doing anything like this at the request of another country,” Mr Carr writes.

There was one victory though. Indonesia agreed to terminate its visa-on-arrival program for Iranians landing at Jakarta airport, a people-smuggling hub.

Mr Carr later hails Mr Rudd's PNG solution as a “masterstroke”.

“He's going to take those Iranian queue jumpers and resettle them; not just process them, but resettle them in Papua New Guinea,” he writes when news of the policy, hatched by Mr Rudd, reached him.

At the subsequent cabinet meeting to approve the policy, Mr Carr was “the one minister to back him on principle”.

“I leapt in to say that this was the biggest threat to territorial integrity since WWII and that I agreed with Prime Minister's view that we needed to quickly demonstrate that people-smuggling would be defeated.”