I have a simple question: do we want terrorists to be in this country or not? For the "no" case, I give you Tony Abbott, who so desperately does "not want terrorists loose on our streets" that he has released a bill to snatch dual nationals' Australian citizenship away if they've gone to fight with Islamic State. In truth, it does massively more than that, but the central intent seems clear: to ensure terrorists who have left the country can't get back in.

For the "yes" case, I give you …Tony Abbott, whose government has cheerfully cancelled the passports of something like 80 Australians with designs on leaving. If we assume the government thinks they're terrorists, then we're actively forcing these people to run loose on our streets, rather than Syria's where, given Islamic State's current strategy with Western recruits, they'd most likely be killed quickly as cannon fodder.

Meanwhile we've undergone a whole legislative process to create new criminal offences of being in the wrong place without an excuse. Remember the no-go zones? It's a scheme that more or less assumes people are coming back, presumably to be prosecuted. And yet, when shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus suggested this would be a good thing, suddenly he was "rolling out the red carpet for terrorists".

All of which raises the question: if the main game was always to institute what Abbott this week described as a modern form of "banishment", why all this legislation for the laying of red carpet last year? Wouldn't that banishment be your starting point, from which everything else is proceeds?