A LARGE banner in St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne, about making refugees "fully welcome", will stay in place until Australia's "inhumane and demeaning" asylum-seeker policies are changed, the Dean, the Very Revd Dr Andreas Loewe, has said.

The seven-metre-high banner was hung from the south-west spire last August, in conjunction with the Brotherhood of St Laurence, an Anglican agency. Dr Loewe said that it was designed to challenge politicians.

Speaking after recent claims that the Australian Navy had placed asylum-seekers in a lifeboat and instructed them to return to Indonesia, Dr Loewe said that future Australian generations would "judge this policy for what it is: inhumane to those seeking our protection, and demeaning to Australia as a nation". God would also judge it, he said.