Out in the regions where infrastructure is rudimentary, the coercive apparatus of the state exerts even less influence. The vacuum is filled by poverty, lawlessness, violence, and corruption. PNG is a borderline failed state. Illustration: John Spooner. Yet this is the country Kevin Rudd, in his second desperate incarnation as prime minister, decided should assume Australia's international obligations to protect and permanently resettle asylum seekers arriving by boat. With this week's fatal riots at the Manus Island immigration detention centre, the abject moral bankruptcy of that decision has been laid bare. Labor's muted response to the crisis now engulfing the Manus Island centre and the policy under which it was established reveal another harsh reality. Brutality is a bipartisan position.

It took Rudd's boundless ambition, to backflip by signing the deal with PNG Prime Minister Peter O'Neill, but it has taken a special kind of focus from Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison to see the policy through to its current horror. Rudd has now left the Parliament, but the stain of that hasty cynical arrangement is his legacy - and that of Labor. It was struck in full knowledge of the economic limitations of PNG, its rampant police corruption and the functional political limits of Port Moresby's authority. Rudd hoped it would neutralise the Abbott opposition's rampaging war on Labor's failed asylum seeker policy, at least for long enough to make it through an election he was about to call. The then opposition duly slammed the PNG plan as irrelevant and unworkable, but then adopted it once in office. No one pretends the policy of zero admissions to Australia is not harsh - indeed, that is a central design feature, calculated to remind refugees that Australia is closed to all but those entering via the UNHCR queue. Its sole, and until now, compelling, moral justification is that by stopping the boats the government has stopped people drowning at sea. Yet now, with fatal shots fired, it is the policy itself that has begun killing people.

After 24 hours of disturbances among the hapless and hopeless 1340 asylum seekers held there, one man is dead, a dozen more are seriously injured, and another 65 have lesser injuries. While Morrison projected his now standard contempt for accountability, holding faux press conferences where he refused to answer most questions, two things have become increasing clear. First, that Manus Island, hell-hole that it is, is not just part of Operation Sovereign Borders, it is its linchpin. Without it, the whole offshore policy crumbles. The fact that everything depends on Manus remaining online was evidenced by Abbott's emergency chat with O'Neill in the wake of the first incident on Monday night. The Australian PM was reassured that PNG was still solid. The spectre of First World wealthy Australia craning in desperation to retain the acquiescence of its impoverished neighbour is an embarrassment and reveals the structural flaw at the heart of the policy. Second, with the riots on Manus, there is a powerful sense of deja vu. Riots, hunger strikes, suicides, and dysfunctional behaviour were all products of indefinite detention in the remote onshore camps of the early 2000s. This is the future now for those banished to Manus and Nauru.

If asylum seekers are attributed no other virtue, their supreme ability to conceptualise a better future must at least be acknowledged. Why else would any risk their lives? Indefinite detention is specifically designed to obliterate that future. We already know how that ends. Loading Mark Kenny is The Age's chief political correspondent. Follow us on Twitter