"Tonight we saw children on Christmas Island being handed the phone number of Senator Muir, and they were asked to call that number and beg that senator to let them out. If that is not treating children as hostages, what is it?" Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young told the Senate on Friday morning, after the passage of the exciting and not at all terrifying new laws. Muir has denied that he spoke to any of the children, and Morrison hasn't bothered denying it, declaring that Hanson-Young and Labor leader Bill Shorten "have proven themselves irrelevant and impotent when it comes to having solutions on border protection." As a fun aside, reportedly more than 250 asylum seekers are currently on a hunger strike on Manus Island. So those solutions are clearly working super great! Problems with political impotence? Mozza's not wrong about the political irrelevance of his adversaries, though, since Morrison can now define terms like "refugee" all he wants without having to bother referring to stupid international treaties like, say, the United Nations Refugee Convention.

It's a document which Australia helped draft back when human rights meant "saving people's lives" rather than "fighting for the right of broadcasters to be more openly racist", a battle which your Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson has been fighting with passionate zeal. Here's a handy article that lays out what the Refugee Convention technically obliged us to do. It all seems like very reasonable stuff. But if you can't be bothered with it, that's fine: neither can this government. See, under the new laws the Immigration Minister can return whoever he likes to wherever he likes, including the place they were fleeing from - a process called "refoulement" that is illegal under international law and deeply immoral under any sense of human justice. Australian naval forces now don't have to obey any duty of care nonsense hitherto required, again, under international law, asylum seekers can be refused entry on ground of "character" or "national interest" without appeal or any requirement for explanation, and the Refugee Review Tribunal is now off-limits to refugees - which is good, since they were probably just going to use it for review purposes anyway.

Oh, and Temporary Protection Visas are back - although those who get them can probably forget about staying in Australia permanently. On the plus side, the refugee intake is going up by 5,000 a year (still not hitting the 20,000 per year level it was before the Coalition got in), although since that was a promise rather than part of the legislation there's not really any reason for Morrison to actually do it. After all, that would require him to have something other than contempt for other people. He's also releasing children from detention on Christmas Island (but not Nauru or Manus Island) and again, like the intake thing, it's great to know that he could have done something about it any time he wanted. Of course, then he'd have had nothing with which to blackmail the Senate. But will hurting people be enough to make us love the government again? It's easily the biggest win that the Coalition have enjoyed in the final week of Parliament, leading to the question whether flouting international law in order to torture the planet's most vulnerable will be enough to make people fall back in love with the Abbott government.

The signs, it's fair to say, are not looking promising. The Galaxy Poll has Labor ahead of the Coalition on primary support for the first time since the election, 41 per cent to 38 per cent. On two party preferred terms, Labor are currently on a landslide victory level with 55 per cent. Galaxy's David Briggs helpfully pointed out that, "In Victoria, support for the Coalition is below the vote achieved by the Napthine government at the state election last weekend," which bodes badly for anyone not hoping for this will be a one term government. Fortunately, going by the current polls, it would appear that there's not that many of them. Leaving the leave?

So the government's going to have a little think about how to win back the Australian people during the break, aside from banking heavily on the national heart growing fonder during their absence. One way is that Tony "the placeholder PM" Abbott is "refining" his beloved paid parenting leave scheme. Part of that is lowering the threshold for eligibility so it doesn't look quite as massive a subsidy to the wealthy. The exact details of the scheme, which the PM is planning to introduce some time next year, are still unknown and probably won't be clear until the release of the Productivity Commission report into childcare It would seem, however, that some of the estimated $5.5 billion the scheme will cost will be going into childcare - an idea suggested in July in the draft report, and completely dismissed by your Minister for Women.

And that sounds eminently sensible and horribly like an actual good piece of policy, so it's reassuring to know that a number of Coalition backbenchers have flagged their intention to cross the floor to vote against it. Why, paid parental leave? Next we'll be giving women the right to vote! Health Department begrudgingly launches new health initiative Speaking of good ideas whose implementation has been designed to make them fail, Assistant Health Minister Fiona Nash has relaunched the "healthy star" rating system, in an indifferent announcement where she made clear this scheme absolutely wasn't compulsory, that it'll be assessed for usefulness in five years or so, and for which there still isn't a website since she deep sixed it back in February. The star rating system is a nice, simple, easy-to-understand idea, which is why food manufacturers hate it.