It came right at the end of a jaw-dropping exchange between Tony Abbott and 3AW’s Neil Mitchell in which the prime minister had not denied Australian officials paid people smugglers to turn back to Indonesia – something that might have once been described as providing them with a business model.

Abbott had defaulted to national security rhetoric to justify his refusal to deny the extraordinary claim.

“There are all sorts of things that our security agencies do that they need to do to protect our country and many of those things just should never be discussed in public. Operational matters, when it comes to national security, are never discussed in public and that’s the way it should be,” Abbott said, without explaining the security threat posed by the Bangladeshi, Burmese or Sri Lankan refugees reportedly on the boat or how giving the people smugglers money would allay it.

Mitchell: “OK, so whatever it takes?”

Abbott: “Consistent with being a humane and decent country, absolutely.”

Tony Abbott refuses to rule out paying people smugglers to turn back boats Read more

Perhaps that should have been “whatever it takes” to be re-elected?

Australia’s national security “debate”, for example, is a response to the serious threat posed by Islamic State but it’s also a way for Tony Abbott to back Bill Shorten into the politically untenable position of being “weak on terror”.

That second, usually unspoken, political fight throws up policies that encroach on basic democratic principles and freedoms and alarmist language that could be seriously counterproductive to the aim of keeping us “safe”.

Labor and Liberal MPs believe the prime minister would like the option of calling an election later this year or early next. The presumed plan is that the budget will give the economy a lift, obscuring the fact that the Coalition has done little on the “debt and deficit disaster’’ it talked about during the last election, the constant drum beat of national security will benefit the Coalition and Bill Shorten’s lacklustre performance as opposition leader will mean that – when it comes down to the mano e mano confrontation of an election campaign, voters will opt for Abbott, despite their reservations.

They believe the government is searching for policies that will eventually find the line at which Labor cannot acquiesce. Bingo. Weak on terror.

It could come during this next sitting fortnight if the government finally reveals the legislation to revoke the citizenship of Australian dual nationals fighting with Isis. Last time the parliament sat, Abbott was demanding Shorten’s support, sight unseen.

“We know, instinctively, that anyone who raises a gun or a knife to an Australian because of who we are has utterly forfeited any right to be considered one of us,” he said “That is what we believe. What do you believe?”

And Shorten (kind of) cracked – offering “in principle” for the idea of fighters losing citizenship, but not necessarily for the decision being at the discretion of the minister, with courts only being able to review whether he followed correct procedure, and not the merits of the decision.

But that fudge won’t work once the laws are tabled. The fact that lawyers are also worried about the wisdom and constitutionality of allowing ministerial discretion without review will be cold political comfort when weighed against last week’s Essential poll.

Tim Wilson questions power to revoke citizenship on ‘suspicion of terrorism’ Read more

It found 81% of voters backed the idea of revoking citizenship, including 77% of Labor voters. Answering a separate question, 54% thought the decision should be up to a court and only 24% thought it should be left to a minister, but no one knows whether that proviso would change their position on the first question.

Or it may come if the prime minister ever manages to convince his own cabinet of the plan to revoke the citizenship of sole citizens who can claim citizenship somewhere else. Or maybe we’ll get there with the new laws – as yet entirely unspecified – that the attorney general, George Brandis, has flagged for the end of the year.

And the search for whatever it takes to find Labor’s moral bottom line comes against a backing track of fear-inducing rhetoric, so constant it almost seems normal, until compared with rhetoric from overseas.

Here are some excerpts from the speech by the US president, Barack Obama, opening the White House summit on countering violent extremism in February.

“Violent extremists and terrorists thrive when people of different religions or sects pull away from each other and are able to isolate each other and label them as “they” as opposed to “us;” something separate and apart. So we need to build and bolster bridges of communication and trust.

“In some of our countries, including the United States, Muslim communities are still small, relative to the entire population, and as a result, many people in our countries don’t always know personally of somebody who is Muslim. So the image they get of Muslims or Islam is in the news. And given the existing news cycle, that can give a very distorted impression. A lot of the bad, like terrorists who claim to speak for Islam, that’s absorbed by the general population. Not enough of the good – the more than 1 billion people around the world who do represent Islam, and are doctors and lawyers and teachers, and neighbors and friends.”

And here are some excerpts from Tony Abbott’s speech opening Australia’s regional conference on countering violent extremism on Thursday, with a little less emphasis on good news stories or social cohesion.

“We have all seen on our screens the beheadings, the crucifixions, the mass executions and the sexual slavery that the Daesh death cult has inflicted, mostly on Muslims, in the Middle East. That is what the death cult has in store for everyone if it has its way.

“This is not terrorism for a local grievance; this is terrorism with global ambitions. The death cult now holds sway over an area as large as Italy in eastern Syria and northern and western Iraq.

“Its affiliates control parts of Libya and Nigeria; it is active on the Horn of Africa and parts of the Arabian peninsula and it has ambitions to establish a far province in south east Asia ... Its senior members are routinely calling on sympathisers to kill un-believers wherever they find them, sometimes specifying Australians.

“Daesh is coming, if it can, for every person and for every government with a simple message: submit or die.”

The conference was a good idea and the government does have programs and policies for deradicalisation.

Tony Abbott using citizenship debate to win next election, Muslim leader says Read more

But the assembled experts on deradicalisation were obviously not the intended audience for Abbott’s warning that Daesh is coming to get us.

And at least one participant, Abdul Rehman-Malik, programs manager for Radical Middle Way, an outreach group for young Muslims, thinks calling Daesh, or Isis, a death cult, actually helps their propaganda because it buys into Isis’ own narrative. Abbott begged to differ.

There’s always been a strain of “whatever it takes” in politics. Just ask Richo. Right now it seems particularly fierce, to the detriment of transparency and coherent policy.