I’m sorry to be blunt, but suggesting that anything in national politics right now is being governed by a coherent, grand masterplan is complete and utter bollocks. Both Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese are feeling their way forward, day by day, week by week, rather than charging ahead, brimming with certainty.

While the only certainty of right now is that everything remains protean, one post-election experiment really stands out on the Labor side. It’s been conventional wisdom in Labor since losing the Tampa election that every time asylum boats hit the headlines, the Coalition prospers. But rather than shrink away from the conversation, the opposition has opened a political contest.

Kristina Keneally, who was given home affairs by Albanese after blasting her way into the front bench when some of the right faction blokes thought her advancement post-election might be optional, is showing little inclination to cower behind the furniture when Peter Dutton rumbles in like a cement mixer on Ray Hadley, or Paul Murray, or when the invisible hand works its “senior security sources” magic in the Courier Mail or the Australian, trumpeting some imminent boat-related Armageddon.

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Keneally is responding to the predictable Dutton complex shtick by smiling amiably, and shoving right back. Her portfolio assertiveness, the leaning in, is only in its infancy, but it has triggered small plumes of outrage in the Australian, which appears intent on styling Keneally as its latest obnoxious progressive femme – possibly Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a Hillary Clinton pants suit – although the precise caricature is still in development.

Out in the real world, this querulous, Colonel Blimp-inspired hiss of shut up girlie and let the grown ups talk wafting from the national broadsheet buglers might be considered hitting a KPI – a sign that you are on the side of the angels – but, as they say in the classics, only time will tell.

In any case, Labor is experimenting with, as Scott Morrison is fond of saying, having a go to get a go. To set our scene, Dutton is a black-and-white former Queensland cop who rolls forward relentlessly. The direction of travel is always a straight line, the velocity provided by the mantras that sustain and enlarge him as a political figure. Labor is ignoring Dutton’s straight line and has begun popping up in less prosecuted areas in the border protection debate.

The opposition is running a number of attack lines simultaneously, starting with whether the minister is managing his large and complex portfolio competently – pointing to blow-outs in processing times for visa claims and citizenship applications.

Keneally is also asking whenever she’s in front of an open microphone whether the Coalition’s fixation on the boats has allowed weakness to develop at airports – invoking, for example, the 81,596 people who have arrived by plane and claimed asylum since 1 July 2014. “Peter Dutton has failed to notice that criminal syndicates that people smugglers have shifted their business model from boats to planes,” she declared on Friday. Another question being pursued is whether Australia’s migration system is being used by criminal syndicates and labour hire companies to traffic exploited workers into Australia.

The purpose of all this interference (apart from testing Dutton’s capacity to multitask) is to pose a simple yet substantial question – does Australia really have the hard border of the Dutton talking points, or is this all just a massive confidence trick; the unchecked, uninterrogated fantasy of the flat-track bully?

When it comes to border protection, the Coalition feels a victim of its own success.

Aligned with testing Dutton’s shibboleths (call that Project Hard Border) is Project Compassion. Some in Labor think the Coalition has developed a political problem with its own progressive-leaning constituency – that there is now acute moral discomfort amongst many traditional small “l” Liberal voters about the cohort languishing in Nauru and Manus Island.

The instinct that the centre of gravity in the Australian asylum debate might have shifted a few degrees in favour of compassion is giving Labor some comfort in holding firm (at least on all current evidence) against the medevac repeal, and in prosecuting the cause of the Sri Lankan family from Biloela. In workaday political terms, these case studies also allow Labor to project progressive values to elements of the base concerned that the party’s failure to win government in May heralds a “bitch and fold” identity crisis.

But an interesting dimension in all this is that Labor is not experimenting with its post-election approach in a vacuum. The government is also cutting its cloth to suit the times.

When it comes to border protection, the Coalition feels a victim of its own success. All the sovereignty-first invocations of the Howard era (“we decide who comes here”) should be really potent in 2019; white hot, in fact, in a fractured political age where populism and nativism has taken root post global financial crisis. Yet there’s a view that voters seem to think the Australian government has solved the problem.

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So now the government is trying to telegraph a slightly different message. Yes, we were the people who stopped the boats (which was always a stretch incidentally, given the boats kept coming, not frequently, but regularly).

We stopped them, but be aware those people smugglers can start up again at anytime, and that’s why you need (as Scott Morrison declared on Monday) a government “able to defeat [the boats] time and time and time and time again”.

There’s an obvious irony here of course. Morrison was the architect of “on water” matters, a policy mantra predicated on low to no disclosure of what was going on in the ocean to the north of Australia under Operation Sovereign Borders.

But now the balance of political risks and opportunities has shifted in favour of selective disclosure. Morrison was admirably frank earlier this week when he noted that talking about the ventures the government wants to talk about “keeps the issue of the ever-present threat of illegal arrivals to Australia foremost in the public’s mind”. Not much subtlety there.

So how does this story end? Labor’s newly found assertiveness is not without political risk, and senior players know that the downside of engagement is opening up a corrosive conversation, historically prone to manipulation, that could be damaging both for the country and for Labor’s election prospects.

But as one senior player puts it: “Talking about boats might mean the government wins. But if we don’t talk, they win too.”