Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's reported $1 million donation to the Liberal Party's election campaign has not appeared in the Australian Election Commission's donation disclosure. Credit:Getty Images Australia's PM Joseph Lyons, meanwhile, was hanging out with his good pal Benito Mussolini and talking him up to the British government. Now, you'd think with the horror of Hitler's Final Solution still in the living memory of people all over the world, that when a populist leader makes a sweeping edict regarding an entire community of his own citizens based upon their religion and ethnicity then it wouldn't be the least bit controversial to say that this is not OK. In fact, you might correctly think it was literally the very, very least that any responsible international leader could do. Currently no one from the Muslim majority countries of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen can enter the US for at least three months, thanks to a sudden new law enacted by President Donald Trump. Quartz have published the entire press release – complete with its many, many amendments – if you're curious about how vague, paranoid hatreds can be effectively and rapidly transformed into dangerous policy.

Several observers have noted that this list doesn't include certain Muslim majority countries – most notably Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates – with whom Trump still does business, despite their links to terrorist activity and in spite of the fact that presidents are supposed to divest themselves of their business holdings lest there be exactly these sorts of conflicts of interest. US residents are reportedly being held at American airports and still more have been refused entry onto planes back to their homeland, where they have houses and businesses and pets and responsibilities. World leaders, including US allies, have not been backward in coming forward to suggest this is a terrible idea. German Chancellor Angela Merkel responded to the edict by literally explaining the Geneva Convention to Trump. Canadian PM Justin Trudeau tweeted that refugees would be welcome in his country. Scotland's first minister Nicola Sturgeon has called for Trump's upcoming diplomatic visit to the UK to be cancelled, and even British Prime Minister Teresa May, being slammed locally as "Teresa the Appeaser", has suggested that Trump suspend the law to help quell the current chaos. And Australia's leader? Oh, he didn't want to make a fuss. "It's not my job as Prime Minister of Australia to run a commentary on the domestic policies of other countries," he bravely sulked to Sky News.

So that must have been a different Malcolm Turnbull who seemed pretty damn eager to run commentary on the domestic policies of other countries last March when he hectored Europe over having "allowed their security measures to slip" in the wake of the Brussels attacks, presumably. In fact, Malc went further by suggesting that the Trump ban was some sort of backhanded compliment to his own government. "We have here in Australia, border security arrangements which are the envy of the world," he declared. "If others wish to emulate what we're doing, they're welcome to do so." Treasurer Scott Morrison was similarly full of praise for the policy, comparing it favourably to our own treatment of refugees in complete defiance of international law, such as the 1951 Convention on the Rights of the Refugee, for example, which he and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton have merrily discarded in pursuit of the government's border protection policies. In other words, in the past 36 hours our government didn't just refuse to criticise the Trump administration for its racist new policies and open dereliction of the rule of law: it has sided with them. Turnbull's silence is doubtlessly connected with his very reasonable fears that maybe Trump won't honour the US's commitment to take our unwanted refugees held on Manus Island and Nauru – which, given that a lot of said detainees are Muslims from Syria, Iran and other banned countries, seems destined to collapse regardless.