Repeat after me: Tony Does Not Negotiate With Anyone

The Australian 23 December 2011

All the arguments about the pros and cons of locking people up indefinitely onshore or offshore or beating them with sticks or not in Malaysia or sending them to Nauru or forcing them to watch an entire Question Time on stopping the boats as a deterrent and whether deterring people is even much of a deterrent at all or whether it’s even the right thing to do in the first place because it might be push factors or pull factors or Push Me Pull You factors and could Doctor Doolittle help in that case and if a tree falls on a queue that isn’t there in a forest is it okay to jump it and will that question confuse the focus groups are indeed vexed questions, because hopping on a boat is clearly very dangerous indeed, but so is treating people like problems to be solved with extreme prejudice so, well, bugger.

If after all this time and all the angst the best our elected representatives can come up with  is kicking ’em in the teeth until they stop moving, then so be it I suppose, but we should be bloody well ashamed of ourselves.

All that said, in the middle of all the moral confusion and best worst choices and cheerful sadists and bleeding hearts and genuine human misery, the one thing you can be pretty confident about is that the political game of Stop The Boats By Being The Biggest Bastard is not a game that the ALP is likely to win.