But there's a more pernicious fiction here that simply must be called out: the fiction that we're doing this because we're so benevolent. ''The government is committed to … giving people better options than risking their lives at sea,'' said Immigration Minister Chris Bowen, as though we're providing a service. It's the kind of thing your phone company tells you when it's about to ratchet up prices. Better options? Which ones exactly? The option to be ignored for years in a camp, stuck in a mirage of a queue that doesn't move because we barely process it? They have that option already, thanks. The fact that lots of people actually prefer to take a risk that might kill them tells you just how abysmal that option is.

Let's be honest. The aim here is to make staying in no man's land the only option. We're not providing any alternatives. We're not hurriedly clearing the backlog of asylum seekers that haven't been resettled since forever. We're not, say, processing applications in the region within a year. The only message we're sending is: don't come. We're not offering somewhere else to go. We're offering nothing except delay and rejection. If that's a better option, it's mainly better for us. And that's what really counts.

All this is obscured by the high moral rhetoric. ''We're trying to save people's lives here,'' says Bowen. You see the effect. High stakes justify extreme measures, and how could the stakes be any higher than death? Now the moral script is flipped. To oppose this measure is to vote for the deaths of these tragic souls. It's almost akin to murder. You're a bleeding heart with blood on your hands.

But it's a sleight of hand. If this is really all about saving people's lives, if this is really about preventing people from drowning at sea, then send a fleet of cruise liners to Indonesia to pick up the people who have been stuck there for up to a decade. It's much safer. Or if arrivals by plane are so superior, charter a bunch of Qantas flights to pick them up and bring them here for processing. That's much safer, too. People smuggling will disappear instantly. Surely we could provide a superior people smuggling service than some poor Indonesian kids with dodgy boats. Let's beat them at their own game. We're trying to save people's lives here, right?

I'll admit this suggestion is ridiculous if we all admit the inescapable truth that flows from it: that this must be about something other than saving lives. We're only interested in saving lives if it involves punitive forms of deterrence. We're not interested in doing it through increased generosity, for example, by seriously increasing our humanitarian intake and significantly speeding up our processing times. What we really want is for asylum seekers to stop being our problem.