Capturing and handing over Tamil asylum seekers directly to the torturers of the Sri Lankan regime is a new low in refugee persecution, even by the abysmal standards of Australian governments. But it is hardly a break with tradition.

While the transfer into the waiting arms of the Sri Lankan regime may be more direct today, we should not forget that 1,000 refugees were sent back under Gillard and Rudd. Nor should we forget the many asylum seekers, largely Hazaras, returned to the tender mercies of the Taliban by the Howard government during the first version of the “Pacific solution”.

Today’s “enhanced screening” of Tamils on the high seas, which Labor says isn’t transparent enough, is virtually identical to the “screening out” of asylum seekers that Labor prided itself on less than a year ago. And since mandatory detention of refugees was introduced in 1992, there’s been one version or another of the same screening lottery, where your chances of being accepted as a refugee depend on using the right form of words in answer to questions designed to prove you are a fraud.

But while there are similarities, there has also been escalation. A situation in which refugees’ attempted suicides and self-harm are not empathised with but dismissed as “moral blackmail” is the result of a long term process of demonisation. As far as Abbott is concerned, it is the self-harming refugee mothers on Christmas Island who are at fault, and the government that is the victim: “No Australian government should be subjected to the spectacle of people saying ‘unless you accept us, I am going to commit self-harm’.”

Establishing that Australia needs to repel asylum seekers at any cost – to them – is not a static process. By the method of successive approximations, the moral bankruptcy of refugee policy is refined. The key message for refugees and the Australian population alike is that refugees are going to suffer. Year by year, new precedents that previously would have been rejected become normalised.

Once you have established that refugees are “queue jumpers” whose selfish actions hurt the poor Australian government, there is no limit to what can be done to them. The logic of escalation is built in precisely because any compassion or exceptions would undermine the argument. Thus Scott Morrison happily sent a disabled child to Nauru to prove the government’s toughness. “If you’re fit enough to get on a boat, then you can expect you’re fit enough to end up in offshore processing”.

Once you have established that at least some refugees are a “threat to national security”, then nothing that happens to them is of any consequence. There are currently 51 people who have been found to be refugees yet face detention for the rest of their lives due to negative ASIO security assessments. Some have been detained for years, with drastic consequences for their mental health.

Their children share the same fate. The murder of refugee Reza Barati on Manus Island this year was callously brushed aside. The family of Leo Seemanpillai were refused permission to come to Australia for his funeral after he committed suicide in despair.

Similarly, once you have proclaimed that asylum seekers have nothing to fear from the regimes from which they have fled, then those regimes’ practices become normalised.

Hence Tony Abbott excuses the Sri Lankan regime’s use of torture by saying “we accept that sometimes in difficult circumstances difficult things happen” – and gives them a couple more warships to go with the airport surveillance cameras provided by Rudd.

There are no depths to which the government will not sink. Part of the reason is that they are under no pressure from the Labor Party, which agrees with them on all the fundamentals. The constant leapfrogging between them to come up with new ways of stopping the boats merely results in the whole debate moving to the right.

The other escalation is the constant proclamation that there is a crisis. This is necessary because nothing else makes this a key issue for most people. Refugees are no threat to anyone, so without the constant alarmism, the issue would drop off most people’s radar.

What will it take to stop it?

Clearly, with the ALP and Coalition being two sides of the same coin, there is no point in waiting for the next election. Given the dynamic of escalation, there is equally no point in making concessions to seem more reasonable. This just strengthens the position of those who want to keep refugees out by conceding some of their arguments.

But just as the refugee bashers look to the past for inspiration, so can we. Refugees have never passively accepted their conditions, but protested in every way open to them. Over the last decade a number of former workers in detention centres broke confidentiality agreements to speak out on what they had witnessed. Refugee activism has brought thousands onto the streets, including in vigorous response to Rudd’s “PNG solution” last July.

The Howard government in 2001 used armed force to seize the Tampa and dump its asylum-seeker passengers in remote offshore detention centres. A total of 1,637 asylum seekers were diverted and processed in these hell holes. John Howard said that no refugees from Nauru would ever set foot in Australia. But the majority of them did come to Australia, because of protests in Nauru and Australia.