Julia Gillard has rejected suggestions her government's detention of children was inconsistent with her subsequent role as chairwoman of the Global Partnership for Education and has dismissed as a "snapshot of history" Amnesty International claims that conditions for asylum seekers on Nauru were "toxic" and "inhumane".

In rare public comments on her government, Ms Gillard addressed questions about the hardline asylum seeker policies undertaken under her prime ministership, which had seen the number of children locked up reach its highest level in the year she was replaced by Kevin Rudd.

Her government re-opened Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea in 2012 amid the escalating number of asylum seeker boat arrivals.

Saying "I stand by the decisions I made", she also spoke of the terrible moments when as prime minister she had been advised of deaths at sea when crowded vessels sank.

Speaking to al-Jazeera current affairs program UpFront, in an interview to be aired on Saturday morning, Ms Gillard said the tough response to asylum seeker arrivals had been entirely necessary and was motivated by the aim of stopping dangerous ocean voyages by desperate refugees.

"The hardline approach, in my view, does have a humanitarian underpinning, which is we do not want people taking that journey and running those risks," Ms Gillard said.

"The government I led was trying to do everything it could to deter people from getting on boats ... Our message to people who were desperate and fleeing hard circumstances was we are going to take refugees, but don't try and make the journey by boat. You may not survive, your children may not survive.

"You don't quite know what it's like as prime minister to get the telephone call from your defence forces that tell you that they suspect that an asylum seeker boat has gone down and they are engaging in desperate measures to try and rescue people from the water," she said. "Whatever they do, people die."

While many people in Australia worried that Canberra was presenting a callous face to the world and rejecting the most desperate and destitute, Ms Gillard said the approach had been correct.

"We took a set of decisions in a very difficult time when we were seeing increasing numbers and we were worried about deaths."

"We had a policy that I wanted to pursue which was a co-operative arrangement with Malaysia. I was blocked by the Parliament from doing that."

This was a reference to the policy ultimately dismantled in the High Court after being bitterly opposed by an opposition that once in government itself would enact even harsher policies, including forced boat turn-arounds, and cash payments — essentially bribes — to people smugglers.

Pressed on the apparent inconsistency between her current role as advocate for girls' education in particular, and her previous policies of mandatory third-country detention of women and children, Ms Gillard offered no apology.

"We took a set of decisions in a very difficult time," she said, adding that, "To suggest that that record in any way undermines my passion or my credibility on education is to wholly misunderstand it."

Labor's Malaysian "people swap" proposal was never given the chance to work, because the opposition under Tony Abbott's leadership branded it immoral and refused to pass enabling legislation to render it constitutional.

Later Mr Abbott employed more extreme measures based on the edict of absolute refusal of Australian resettlement for any boat arrivals. That policy has since been embraced by Labor under Bill Shorten's leadership.

Follow us on Twitter