It is like handing Jews over to the Nazis. That was the entirely legitimate response of refugee supporters to news the Australian government does indeed appear to plan handing over more than 150 mostly Tamil asylum seekers to the Sri Lankan government.

There is, understandably, a desperate tone to much of the left commentary surrounding this issue. While on many issues the left can claim to speak for the majority, it’s just not true when it comes to asylum seeker policy.

No matter what the latest government atrocity, there remains a large majority prepared to back it. How can this appalling situation be turned around?

Here is a suggestion: let’s start talking about the class war.

Refugee supporters have centred their argument on the immorality of the way our government treats refugees. It’s an entirely valid and important starting point. But the problem is that it hasn’t cut through. Why? Because the anti-refugee rhetoric of the right, which seeks to focus the sense of anger and impotence so many people feel about their lives onto people trying to reach Australia by boat, taps into a very real and legitimate anxiety about job security, about the availability of social services and about living standards more generally.

It is a great con. But the Liberals have convinced many people to buy into the idea that the many and varied threats to the livelihoods of ordinary people can be blamed on the poor and wretched people who come to this country pleading for our help.

The falsity of this narrative has never been clearer than it is today. We have a government that was elected in no small part because it convinced many people of the necessity of “stopping the boats” in order to safeguard the interest of ordinary Australians.

But what was the result of electing this government? They have stopped the boats, sure. If preventing people from escaping persecution is a noble accomplishment, they should get a medal. But the most important result of electing a party that will “stop the boats” has not been anything to do with the few thousand people who have been prevented from entering Australia – a number so small as to be unnoticeable if it were not screamed from the headlines of the Murdoch tabloids.

The main result of electing a “stop the boats” government has been a savage budget that attacks pensioners, workers, young people, the unemployed and the sick.

And of course that was the entire point. No right-winger ever won an election by declaring they would rule in the interests of the super-wealthy and screw everybody else. There is always a cover story for the class war waged by the powerful, and for the last decade and a bit, bashing refugees and Muslims has been the perfect tool with which the ruling elite have distracted attention from the actual enemy that confronts working class Australians.

For a long time, the refugee movement has agonised about how to “reach out” to the large numbers of people who oppose refugee rights. For the most part, this has ended in retreating from putting an unequivocally pro-refugee position and capitulating to right wing arguments about the need to “manage our borders”. Or it has meant trying to marginalise the voice of the left in the movement in order to present a respectable face to “mainstream Australia”.

None of this has done anything except further entrench the right wing idea that the refugee movement is the preserve of middle class elites who are unconcerned at best and contemptuous at worst of the concerns of working class people.

The budget has exposed this government as a pack of hypocrites and liars, people who cynically played on fear and anxiety to get themselves elected, only in order to savagely attack the vast majority in the interests of the ruling elite.

It is a golden opportunity for the refugee movement to start to turn the tide of public opinion by highlighting the fact that the attacks on refugees are nothing but a magician’s trick, getting us to focus on illusions on the borders while they stab us in the gut.