By ABC's Jonathan Green
Photo: Stopping the boats always depended on acts of regional cooperation and good faith. (AFP: Adek Berry)
The man most responsible for putting Australia on a collision course with Indonesia over the issue of asylum seekers has been allowed to claim credit for restoring calm, writes Jonathan Green.
Stand still long enough and Australian politics will run rings round you, confound you with its endless convolutions, and amaze with its capacity for constant confident reinvention totally detached from history, logic and conscience.
We're talking about the Prime Minister's trip to Indonesia - obviously - a venture judged approvingly on Mr Abbott's return by Paul Kelly in The Australian:
On display now is Abbott as pragmatist. He says his policy is about results, not process. Abbott spelt out his new universal rule: what counts is working with Indonesia to stop the boats. By implication, he will modify policy and process to achieve that goal.
Pragmatism, we can only assume, is a political device of some strength and flexibility. A device powerful enough to neutralise Tony Abbott's vocal three-year campaign to stop or turn back the boats, a campaign represented domestically as a thing of urgent necessity that Australians needed to do for themselves, never mind all this talk of namby-pamby regionalism.
It's a line of rhetoric that has run longer than the three-years of the long election campaign just passed, of course. Both sides of politics have seen the political potential in demonising boat-borne asylum seekers, an issue of no great gravity in terms of numbers or immigration impact, but one ripe to be milked for the most craven kind of political opportunism.
The issue has been through all manner of subtle permutations, casting asylum seekers as likely terrorists, bringers of disease, smug queue jumpers of the moneyed middle classes, people of such desperate cunning they would even throw their children overboard to gain attention ... all of that.
But for the past three years this thin trickle of the world's desperate have been a first order issue for our national discussion. Not directly top of mind for voters - all the polling shows that - but a potent proxy for various voter concerns, from simple racist or religious antipathy, to employment insecurity and concern over crowded suburban infrastructure. Our political class has flogged asylum seekers with a will, as a totemic realisation of each major party's empathy for the concerns of ordinary Australians, and as proxies for their sovereign machismo and territorial resolve.
For Tony Abbott it has been a signature refrain: stop the boats, turning them back where safe to do so.
And then in this past week a strange confection, a weird re-imagining that cast the man responsible for this strident campaign as the man who could, through diplomatic resource, humility and cunning, rephrase this discussion as a cooperative regional venture.
It has been Tony Abbott's triumph that he could convince a sceptical and bristling Indonesian administration that it should publicly join forces against a common scourge. Together, Indonesia now owning this possibility too, we might at long last stop the boats.
And so Tony Abbott is applauded on his return for defusing bilateral tensions that he more than anybody had created.
A strange combination this, of walking away from policy prosecuted through endless and regionally offensive repetition - Stop The Boats - backing off when it seemed that single issue, that passing irritant, that had been at the core of our politics for three long, angry years, no longer suited the demands of office.
Something had to give. The distortion of asylum seeker politics had perverted the course of domestic politics and now it seemed likely that it might also sour our most significant regional relationship, a relationship that might be better focussed on trade and mutually gratifying commerce, rather than be twisted by resentment at Australia's patronising post-colonial muscularity.
And Tony Abbott, who made this muddle for domestic benefit, could now reverse emphasis in a piece of subtle, mature regional diplomacy: this was the act of a prime minister.
"... he will modify policy and process to achieve that goal," noted Paul Kelly.
This would involve modifying policy and processes that had been intrinsic to Mr Abbott's very political being to this point, that had been as close as one might come to statements of core conviction. Stop The Boats. Turn Them Back When Safe To Do So. Tossed aside now for the best and most practical of reasons.
Which was either an act of diplomatic resource, or the end of a long, and bitter, myth.
Because stopping the boats always depended on acts of regional cooperation and good faith, and ultimately on the calm provision of process, opportunity and hope.
We seem close to accepting some of that now, as at last the serious concerns of the real, adult world beyond our borders have made their presence felt, overwhelming with a suddenly broader perspective, the sordid little tissues of anger and hate that have served their purpose as old staples of our domestic conversation.
The great mature cunning is to soften, perhaps even end, the lie that only a determined and, if necessary, cold and brutal Australia could stem the asylum seeker tide. The great tragedy is that we were ever fed it.
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.
