"He saw his uncle, father and cousin just drown. They were right in front of him," said another relative who was translating Omid's story for me. In November that year I met the miracle survivor of another sinking. Habib Ullah set off with 33 shipmates to Christmas Island, but the boat quickly foundered, then sank. "On the first day [in the water] there was hope. Everyone was optimistic,'' he told me. "On the second day, some people, they lost control, shouting and crying ... I would see dead bodies coming from the right side, left side". Habib Ullah, the sole survivor of his boat of 33, on the vessel that rescued him. On the morning of the third day, only three remained, clinging to a rope. One was so desperate he was "trying to drown because he was very thirsty and he was very hungry. So he drowned before my eyes".

Loading Then Habib was the only one left. All these things we documented, but still the boats came. Asylum seekers calculated that the reward of a life in Australia was worth the risk at sea. In Australia, each boat that sank put a jolt through an already charged debate. The politics were furious, and useless. The Rudd and Gillard governments' asylum policy lurched from one unconvincingly tough position to another, and thanks to first the Parliament's, then the High Court’s, 2011 decision to scotch the so-called "Malaysia solution", Labor’s attempt to have any stance at all eventually sputtered out.

Meanwhile, since John Howard, the right had found the fear of “irregular maritime arrivals” a rich political vein to mine. Through 2012 and 2013, the ocean littered with death, Opposition leader Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison, his immigration spokesman, mined it, while blocking any policy response from Labor. The drownings argument added moral weight to their political armoury. People forget now, but Rudd and Gillard did start turning off the spigot in their final year in office. After a spate of boats sinking, Gillard reopened Nauru and Manus Island. In July, 2013, Rudd announced that nobody who arrived by boat would ever settle in Australia. This had some effect: the flow slowed. The Australian lifeboat which brought 28 asylum seekers back to Indonesia in February 2014. Credit:Michael Bachelard But it was too late. The Abbott-Morrison government was sworn in in September 2013 and the air in Indonesia changed. Those waiting for passage believed Abbott and Morrison where they had never believed Rudd and Gillard. Advertising blanketed the hills around Jakarta telling asylum seekers, "No Way", and Australia's rotund orange lifeboats started fetching up on remote Javanese beaches.

Now Bill Shorten and the cross-bench have supported the medivac bill, which will allow doctors much more discretion in who can leave Nauru and Manus Island for medical treatment. Morrison and his boosters, in political trouble, have dusted off six-year-old rhetoric and are trying to revive old lines, old passions. This includes the sound moral argument that we should deter deaths at sea. Once again, he is using these lines against his opponent. "Bill Shorten has done what he has done out of manifest weakness," the Prime Minister said on Wednesday. "He has no strength on this issue and he cannot be trusted to follow through on any of the borde­r protection measures that our government has put in place”. “Every arrival will be on Bill Shorten’s head.”