The Abbott government deserves condemnation for its cynical response last year to allegations about rape, sexual assaults and intimidation at Australia's immigration detention centre on Nauru. First, for denouncing and denigrating Save the Children staff for raising the alarm – as any reasonable person would expect the staff to do. Indeed, it is their obligation.

It also deserves condemnation for releasing Philip Moss's substantial report into those abuse allegations on a day the government's spin doctors well knew was already flooded with news of the death of former prime minister Malcolm Fraser. It received the report six weeks ago.

But this government, which so nonchalantly plumbs moral lows at almost every turn, properly deserves condemnation for failing to provide the standard of care and oversight at the Nauru detention centre that Australians would expect.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton is entirely correct when he says his government inherited this system from Labor. And in The Age's view, those who served in the Gillard and Rudd governments should be ashamed by what they devised: a process of shipping all boat-borne asylum seekers to centres on Nauru and Manus Island, where they will idle indefinitely.

Yet the Abbott government, which has been in power for 18 months and which claims success in stemming the flow of asylum seekers to Australia, continues to preside over this unsound system of outsourcing the care of asylum seekers to other countries. At the very least, it must move swiftly to implement, as it says it will, Mr Moss's practical suggestions for change in the supervision of the Nauru centre.