By ABC's Jonathan Green
Having spent three years shouting about every new boat arrival, Tony Abbott now says it is this information flow that has been a boon to people smugglers, writes Jonathan Green.
Changing the pace. How deft. And this was no subtle variation.
As opposition leader Tony Abbott toured the country, warning day in, day out - his message amplified by the florescent gleam of the inevitable hi-viz vest - of looming crises in border security and the economy, as well as the emergency for families and small businesses confronting first the prospect and then the reality of the carbon tax.
There was no time to be lost. An election ... now! That was the top line melody that came daily, against a steady bass of 'stop the boats' and 'abolish the tax'. Day in, week out. For three outraged years.
And then he was gone: the incredible vanishing Prime Minister. The sudden political calm was greeted by the muted golf clap of the political commentariat, who recognised the dexterity of this political craft work. The discipline. The sense of ordered, deliberate cunning.
Tony Abbott has been Prime Minister now for eight days, a period marked by his sudden withdrawal from public life, part of a broader closing down that clearly aims to remove the sense of urgent emergency that has been the backdrop for our politics since 2010.
A backdrop Tony Abbott created, of course. A backdrop manufactured against all the available evidence: of a robust economy, the steady but tiny trickle of hapless refugees, the neutral impact of the carbon tax. By rights then this backdrop is his to remove at will. And again, you've got to admire the skill. The political polish.
And that might be all very well around the technocratic margins of economic management, that playing field of Australian politics where two sides test their incapacity to truly alter global events against a set of mutually agreed and entirely sensible objectives. No-one really gets hurt there; they can do as they will.
The asylum seeker issue is a little different.
For three years the Abbott opposition did its best to generate a sense of chaos around the steady trickle of boats testing our borders, compassion and policy resolve. There were never that many, that was the truth, and most had reasonable claims to our protection; that was true too. And coming by sea involved an extraordinary and mortal risk, a calculation that was a fair indication of desperation.
For three years every arrival was proclaimed. From the blogs of the enthusiastic election-now! right, from newspapers of like mind. In the recent federal campaign, Tony Abbott even gave his support to a touring billboard that counted down every new boat arrival. The political line was simple and eager: the then government had lost control of our borders, it was unable to secure the perimeter. And worse: through its incapacity it threatened the lives of people tempted by a trade that had been fostered by the Gillard/Rudd governments' abandon and dysfunction.
This became a central pillar in the argument led by Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison: that the asylum seeker issue had urgency because of the terrible loss of life at sea. The proposition was a simple equation: which was the more compassionate response, to tear down the borders and encourage behaviour that risked life, or strengthen those deterrents and stop the boats and their cargo, all potential victims of death by drowning?
Then this week this issue moved from the noisy clamour of opposition to the quiet whirr of industrious government. No daily updates, no eagerly set upon numbers around the steady flow of boat arrivals.
In another master class in political craft, border protection was now a military operation, an area in which secrecy is a commonplace. Loose lips sink ships.
None of it is consistent, of course, none of it rings true. In opposition every boat was numbered and paraded for full political effect. In government the shutters come down.
We are now told that providing a regular flow of information, the "shipping news" as Minister Morrison called it this week, was a boon to the people smugglers, people capable of running complex multinational systems of human movement, but unable, it seems, to track their operations without the assistance of press releases from an obliging Australian government.
Hypocritical, of course.
And morally?
If as Morrison now claims the provision of this information has aided the smugglers, then we can assume it also, by his own arguments, put lives at risk. Logically that is precisely what Messrs Morrison and Abbott have spent the past three years in opposition doing: spreading information for political purpose that by their own standards of "shipping news" encouraged the smugglers and thus put the lives of asylum seekers in terrible jeopardy.
It's just politics, that's the consensus analysis. Just the sort of canny switch of gears we admire as the deft prosecution of the politician's art. And it's all we expect of them really: to play politics for the sake of political advantage and power.
The fact that they do it is not the thing that should bother us. The fact that we shrug our shoulders and recognise the political calculations for what they are and give them grudging admiration, that's the troubling bit.
We let ourselves be taken for this ride, by participating mutely in a structured political drama that can argue for people's very lives in one month then turn around the next and do the opposite straight faced. One of these elections we might demand better.
That we collude quietly for now is a particularly dark piece of moral turpitude. It shouldn't be assessed against the standards of political cunning, it should be judged against the standards of simple decency.
Jonathan Green is the presenter of Sunday Extra on Radio National and a former editor of The Drum. His book, The Year My Politics Broke, is out on October 1. View his full profile here.
Tony Abbott's incredible disappearing act - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
