Peter Dutton would dearly like to channel some of the rising anger over Australia’s indefinite offshore detention of refugees towards those who are trying to hold him to account for the policy.

This week he sought to blame Guardian Australia, the ABC, academics, Save the Children, other human rights groups and the refugees themselves for his problems.

But by flailing around with inaccurate criticisms, false descriptions of what has been happening and myopic assessments of the possible solutions, the immigration minister only succeeds in highlighting his own increasingly desperate political situation.

Dutton says the government has been searching for places to resettle the 442 men, women and children on Nauru and the 854 men on Manus Island – and that’s true, it has.

But it started that search with an intransigent mindset that more or less doomed it from the start. Stopping the boats was not just the primary objective; it was an absolute. Any boat that even attempted a journey was an unacceptable sign of policy failure.

The bipartisan race to the bottom began in the 2013 election, and by 2016 had become so entrenched that any expression of compassion by a Labor candidate for refugee children facing deportation to Nauru was fodder for an immediate “soft on people smugglers” political attack.

Even when turnbacks under Operation Sovereign Borders have stopped people-smuggling operations – even though the government now boasts to the Daily Telegraph that it has established a “ring of steel” across the waters of northern Australia – any resettlement option that leaves open even the remotest chance that an asylum seeker embarking by boat might one day, somehow, end up here has been deemed to pose a risk that people smugglers might start to try their luck again. However small that risk is, and however unlikely it is that people smuggling operations will succeed, these options have been ruled out.

And so the asylum seekers languish, and their suffering escalates, and gradually, despite every effort to keep it out of sight, pressure from the international community and the Australian public starts to build and the political consensus frays.

When John Howard found himself in this situation, he set up a process that eventually resulted in the majority of those on Nauru, who were found to be genuine refugees, being settled in Australia and New Zealand.

Some in the Coalition can see history repeating. Russell Broadbent, a Liberal moderate who was one of those agitating on asylum issues during the Howard years, noted recently that the Nauru Files – the 2000 incident reports from Nauru published by Guardian Australia – were “the sort of thing that brought John Howard to a place where he had to do something about it”.

But, however logical resettling refugees here might seem, especially with the “ring of steel” in place to head off any people-smuggling resurgence, Dutton seems to be leaving no room at all for that kind of backdown, no space to balance the limited risk of a couple more turnbacks against the crushing moral weight of our detention policy.

And that purely political choice turns a difficult situation into an intractable impasse – with 1,296 lives as its human consequence.

It’s a choice that means we have also rejected all other ideas to break the deadlock, including New Zealand’s standing offer to take 150 refugees, and options to entice refugees to accept resettlement in Cambodia with the chance to apply to be part of Australia’s humanitarian intake after a number of years, and options similar to the Gillard government’s Malaysia swap deal (which even Tony Abbott now wishes he hadn’t joined with the Greens to scupper).

Of the 854 men on Manus Island, 98% of those who have had their claims assessed have been found to be refugees who have a “well-founded fear of persecution”. Papua New Guinea has so far resettled only a tiny handful and despite the announcement that the detention centre will close – because the PNG courts say it has to – there are still no answers about what will happen to the men despite two deaths, documented assaults and rising mental illness and despair.

Of those assessed on Nauru, 77% have been found to be refugees. Only one has agreed to resettlement in Cambodia. There are no other resettlement options even though Dutton seemed to suggest on ABC’s 7.30 report this week that the refugees on Nauru had refused to go to New Zealand, Canada, the United States or Malaysia.

After three years in detention, with no idea where, or when they might be able to rebuild their lives, Nauru is also a growing human rights disaster.

Dutton has variously accused Guardian Australia of “hyping’ and “trivialising” the plight of those on Nauru with the publication of the Nauru Files.

“The trouble, frankly with the approach of the Guardian and the ABC has been to trivialise the very serious issues by trying to promote the 2,100 reports as somehow, all of those being serious when they’re not. Many of those reports relate to corporal punishment by children by their own parents. They report about some minor assaults by detainees on detainees, refugees on refugees,” he said on ABC radio on Thursday.

But that is exactly what we reported. As we explained when we published the document cache, it contained incident reports – short summaries of events in the Nauru detention centre ranging from serious allegations of sexual assault, to observations of a threat of self-harm, to abuse of a child, or more mundane incidents such as a child falling over when playing soccer. In our data log we record each incident under its official risk rating – minor, major or critical, and type, from sexual assault, suicide attempts and self-harm to property damage and lost items.

Dutton says he is investigating the allegations in the leak (bizarrely he also attacked Save the Children for not providing him with the unredacted documents, which Nauru service providers have confirmed his department already has) and insists the allegations of assault and sexual abuse will be taken seriously, while dismissing the trivial nature of other incidents.

But that misses the point. All but a few carefully selected journalists are prohibited from visiting Nauru. One reason for publishing the Nauru Files was to provide a picture of the reality of life there through the everyday bureaucracy of the reports, the serious allegations and the minor daily indignities and humiliations. This isn’t just about sexual abuse. It’s about the sanity-sapping uncertainty, and tedium and tension of life under indefinite detention, which quickly amounts to systemic abuse. And Peter Dutton is in charge of the system.

We’ll continue to do what we can to document the consequences for the human beings whose lives are on hold because Australia’s toxic political debate has turned a difficult policy problem into a stand-off without any obvious end point.

Dutton says we in the media sit in the “cheap seats” with no responsibility for finding a solution. But our job is to hold power to account and that is what we are doing. We can report and discuss possible answers. But, Minister Dutton, the moral judgments and the decisions about solutions are your job and your responsibility. Whoever you try to blame.