There’s an awful déjà vu about the words of successive Australian governments justifying decades of inhuman policies towards asylum seekers:

“There are no policy options available in terms of border protection that are not tough, which cannot be described as harsh … But the critical thing is to maintain the security of the border.”

“We cannot be misty-eyed about this … We must have secure borders and we do and we will, and they will remain so, as long as I am the prime minister of this country.”

“None of us have hearts of stone. All of us understand how harsh … our policy is in terms of its impact on particular individuals … look, there’s no point being mealy-mouthed about this.”

These could have been the words of Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison or Peter Dutton (or any of their Labor predecessors). In fact, they are all from the urbane, well-spoken mouth of Malcolm Turnbull over the course of this year.

This should dissolve the halo effect that Turnbull’s personal support for marriage equality or his failure to eat any raw onions may have created. He is as vicious as any of them.

Whether he is justifying sending sick asylum seeker children back to Nauru, denying that the illegality of the Manus Island detention centre will affect Australian warehousing of refugees there or responding to a questioner on Q&A, the message is unfailingly the same.

Possibly the statement that most illustrates the lack of difference between Turnbull and the others is the most recent: “We’ve stopped the boats … If you seek to come to Australia with a people smuggler … you will not come to Australia”.

Channelling both Abbott and Rudd, this is how Turnbull responded to the ABC’s Four Corners program reporting Amnesty International’s new exposé on the torture taking place at the Nauru detention centre. As an Amnesty spokesperson put it, “A system where people have to be subjected to extreme levels of suffering so that others who try to seek asylum in Australia are not tempted to do so”.

Centrally enmeshed with the Islamophobic war on terror and the racist scapegoating it entails, Australia’s refugee policies are not optional for anyone who wants to run Australian capitalism. Hardness of heart is not a personal failing but a requirement. All of them exhibit it.

So the only trauma that Immigration Department head Mike Pezzullo can recognise is of those administering the government’s policy. While “categorically refuting” the Amnesty report, Pezzullo complained about the “traumatisation” and “demoralisation” immigration staff endure at the hands of critics of offshore detention, including refugee children who meanly called them “Nazis”.

Liberal senator Linda Reynolds called criticism of offshore detention “hate speech”.

Apparently the real victims of mandatory detention are not the refugees who are routinely sexually abused, assaulted and dehumanised so that they are driven to self-harm and death.

Exactly like his predecessors and his current fellow human rights abusers, Turnbull can only cloak himself in denial and make threadbare attempts to ignore, discredit or prosecute critics.