By ABC's Annabel Crabb Posted Tue 24 Sep 2013

The asylum seeker debate has become cloaked in a surreal, Alice-in-Wonderland element. Now, the new Government is demanding a spectacular degree of trust from Australians. It's an incredibly big ask, writes Annabel Crabb.

Photo: Mr Morrison assures us that "operational reasons" preclude the timely release of information on asylum seeker boats. (ABC News)

If a boat is turned around, and nobody is told about it, did it happen at all?

Such is the latest brain teaser to be dealt off the pack of asylum seeker policy, this time by Immigration Minister Scott Morrison, the ink on whose vice-regal letter of commission is still drying as I type.

It hardly needs pointing out that the refugee policies of the two major parties have in recent years cleaved so closely together that anything Scott Morrison attempts in office could quite plausibly be envisioned as something Kevin Rudd's government would probably have got around to doing, given enough time.

What is fascinating, though, is the extent to which a surreal, Alice-in-Wonderland element has now colonised this area of public policy.

This is the policy area that gave us "SIEV X" and "A Certain Maritime Incident".

And the story of the Tampa, in which a bewildered Norwegian freighter captain 12 years ago rescued several hundred souls from drowning and then stood aghast as Australian special forces swarmed aboard his vessel.

This is the policy area that occasioned years of tearful debate in the Australian Parliament, as vast portions of the Australian coastline disappeared, then reappeared, then disappeared again from the legislatively-accepted cartography of our own migration zone like the shape of the Cheshire Cat around its own smile.

It gave us perhaps the finest example of determined nonsensicality ever recorded by Kevin Rudd, in which he insisted that removing barriers to unauthorised arrivals would not increase the rate of unauthorised arrivals. Weirdly, this logic survived even its author's comprehensive reversal - during his brief second term in office - of anything that remained of the asylum seeker policies from his first.

This is the policy area that gave us The Oceanic Viking, a boat laden with souls that puttered around the Java Sea while the processing deal Kevin Rudd had "agreed" with Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono quietly disintegrated.

When Julia Gillard relieved Mr Rudd of his leadership, one of her first incursions into these turbulent waters was a half-baked arrangement with East Timor which the new PM sort of announced, then fiercely denied she'd ever mentioned, then insisted for months would definitely happen, right up until the point at which it became as plain as the nose on your face that it wouldn't.

And then came the Malaysia Solution, an arrangement that promised to stamp out the miserable trade in human lives by staging a colossal, state-sponsored swap of unwanted people between two sovereign nations; our 800 for their 4,000, plus money.

Now, we have a new Government, a team of people whose unremitting slogan in Opposition was "Stop The Boats", who now demand a spectacular degree of trust; that we sign away the right to know what our own government is doing.

It's an incredibly big ask.

Labor's acting leader Chris Bowen is appalled at the proposition that the Government will no longer tell us immediately when boats arrive, and may not ever tell us when one is turned around, but his own period as immigration minister involved a great deal of secrecy, as my colleague Leigh Sales pointed out in her 2011 Drum column comparing the media access at a low-security detention centre unfavourably with that at Guantanamo Bay).

Let us also not forget that Labor's principled insistence on non-coverage of individual asylum seekers or groups fell away pretty promptly when they released, among others, this photo of a devastated Iranian asylum seeker, when it was judged operationally advantageous to do so.

Mr Morrison now assures us that "operational reasons" preclude the timely release of information. Because I am operationally challenged, or perhaps because I have insufficient security clearance, I cannot understand how turning boats around in secret instead of in public creates a greater deterrent, operationally.

My best guess is that the removal of boat arrivals from the daily news, and the deletion of their struggles at sea from the national ledger, are calculated to deprive the people aboard those boats of the last hope they had; a vocal contingent of Australian citizens who still looked at them and felt sorry.

That their last hope is also the last commercial hope of the people smugglers and is the single fact that plagues and muddies this entire, bewildering area of public policy; the obvious moral response is also the response that most rewards the immoral.

Strange things happen at sea.

Annabel Crabb is the ABC's chief online political writer. View her full profile here.

Asylum seeker policy: we're all mad here - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)