Polling shows voters are against paying people smugglers to turn back boats, but could it be that their unease comes mostly from spending taxpayer money, rather than any actual concern for asylum seekers? Peter Lewis writes.

Go figure. Just when you thought there was no line of morality that our Government could not cross in their efforts to turn back the boats, along comes a tactic that even the Australian public finds repugnant.

This week's Essential Report set out to gauge attitudes to allegations that people smugglers were being paid by taxpayers to send asylum seekers back to Indonesia. The expectation was that the Australian public would happily wave it through.

After all, every other excess - from changing national borders to deny asylum claims to turning our back on the UN Refugee Convention seems to have been embraced by the Australian public.

Even at the height of the highly secretive and menacingly labelled Operation Sovereign Borders more than a quarter of us thought it was too soft.

Yet last week's allegations have us pausing for thought, with a majority of respondents saying they disapprove of payments to people smugglers.

Q. It has been reported that the Australian Government has paid "people smugglers" to return asylum seekers to Indonesia. Do you approve or disapprove of the Australian Government paying "people smugglers" to take asylum seekers back to Indonesia?

Total Vote Labor Vote Lib/Nat Vote Greens Vote other Total approve 29% 18% 48% 14% 25% Total disapprove 56% 74% 33% 80% 61% Strongly approve 12% 8% 21% 5% 10% Approve 17% 10% 27% 9% 15% Disapprove 20% 21% 20% 14% 28% Strongly disapprove 36% 53% 13% 66% 33% Don't know 15% 8% 19% 6% 13%

True, the response has strong partisan divides with three quarters of Labor and Green voters voicing their disapproval. But even a third of Coalition voters are not comfortable with the proposition.

As a former champion of our borders put it so succinctly: please explain.

Could it be that when new facts about the debate are injected into the public debate opinions can shift? Hardly.

Recent and to date unreleased polling that tested the idea of providing people with more information on the issue, actually found that giving people facts hardened their position against asylum seekers.

For example:

Version A: The current Government policy is to turn back the boats of asylum seekers trying to reach Australia. Do you agree or disagree with this policy?

Version B: The current Government policy is to turn back the boats of asylum seekers trying to reach Australia. However, many of the people on these boats cannot safely enter any other country in the region. Do you agree or disagree with the current policy of turning the boats back?

Version a Version b Total agree 58% 60% Total disagree 27% 24% Strongly agree 30% 34% Agree 28% 26% Disagree 14% 14% Strongly disagree 13% 10% Don't know 15% 16%

Another explanation could be that we are concerned that this policy has taken our relationship to Indonesia to new depths, compromising a partnership that is too precious to mess with.

Not likely. Last time we asked, in the wake of the Chan and Sukumaran executions, we had decided our relationship with Indonesia didn't really matter.

So what's going on here?

My theory is that our concern about the alleged bribes to people smugglers is we are seeing it as just another permutation of our foreign aid program, the one piece of government expenditure that we would like to cut.

After all, in last year's ill-fated budget, cuts to foreign aid were almost the sole measure that met public approval.

In what could be a new line of attack for the pro-refugee lobby, instead of appealing to Australians' hearts they could be appealing to their wallets.

According to the National Commission of Audit, offshore processing is one of the Government's fastest growing cost centres, with $2.9 billion being poured into stopping the boats in 2014-15.

Could it be that our desire to punish people fleeing war zones and exercising the universal right to seek asylum could actually be trumped by our hatred of giving charity to foreigners? Or are the two concepts so enmeshed that we have just tied ourselves in amoral knots?

Either way, the news this week is that yes, there is a line our government can cross on border protection. It's just a pity for the public scrutiny of this issue that the Labor Party appears to have crossed it first.

Peter Lewis is a director of Essential Media Communications.