In Australian governmental policy discourse, the figure of the refugee and asylum-seeking child carries significant affective weight. As theorists such as Liisa Malkki have shown, children are often figured as representatives of a fundamental, pure, untainted humanity. They “are ‘good to think’ as innocent victims” who require saving, she writes. The promulgation of this narrative then creates the potential for a saviour class: policy-makers can narrate themselves as people who can “save” refugee children (often, from drowning, or 'bad parents'). This paper will place this saviour narrative alongside contrary narratives of children as rights-bearers which occasionally appear within policy discussions. As one former ministerial advisor explained to me in an interview, “I came from a human rights background so it was just a no brainer for me that you weren’t going to lock up kids and all of that sort of thing.” In this paper I will thus explore the making of policies for refugee and asylum-seeking children in Australia as a representation of the ways that children’s rights are conceptualised and remembered, as well as evaded, disremembered and ignored, thus historicising notions of the refugee and asylum-seeking child as a racialised affective and rights-bearing figure in Australian political discourse.