Bribing Papua New Guinea to take our refugees may seem an unimaginable course for a civilised country to take. But this is Australia. We do xenophobia well. We shut our doors on Jews before the second world war. Our embassy officials were inspecting bottoms and backs to make sure people were white enough to emigrate here as late as the 1960s. And we had that world first: Tampa.

The shame goes way back. But Kevin Rudd has taken Australia lower than it has ever gone before. He had the relentless encouragement of Tony Abbott. But then beating up on boat people has always been a bipartisan business.

From the time that first boat arrived – the Kein Giang with five Vietnamese men on board – in April 1976, both sides of politics have made the same promise to the nation: to stop the boats, every single boat. There are too many coming now. Too many people are dying on the way. But we are not going to get anywhere while that toxic promise stays on the table.

It has licensed brutality towards boat people for nearly 40 years. When all this began, there was a constituency in this country for dealing decently with asylum seekers who came by sea. But the White Australia policy was barely cold in its grave. The fearful demanded fresh reassurance. So the decision was taken on both sides of politics to play to fear.

No leader since has had the courage to tell Australians what the rest of the world knows: that refugees flee however they may – by air, by land and by sea. Instead, every prime minister since the Kein Giang tied up in Darwin harbor has promoted the Australian delusion that it’s wrong – indeed evil – for refugees to climb into a boat.

Even under the sainted Malcolm Fraser those who came in boats were called “illegals” and “queue jumpers” and accused of “coming in by the back door”. Fraser bravely settled over 100,000 Vietnamese refugees but did everything he could to make sure they did not arrive under their own steam. Australian teams were at work in those days sabotaging refugee boats along the Malaysian coast.

Asylum seekers coming by air don’t trouble us. They aren’t dragged away from Tullamarine and thrown into immigration prisons. But we have spent the best part of 40 years devising new insults and tougher punishments for those who dare to do what asylum seekers do in the Persian Gulf, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean: arrive by sea.

Paul Keating introduced mandatory detention after about 200 Cambodians turned up in boats in one year. The Coalition backed the plan. Ever since, Australia has been saddled with a system that is expensive, cumbersome, cruel and fails to deter. Whether we hold asylum seekers on Christmas Island, in the middle of the desert or way out in the Pacific, the boats keep coming.

John Howard was a genius at mustering our fears of the boats. He pinched his policy from Pauline Hanson, who said: “We go out, we meet them, we fill them up with fuel, fill them up with food, give them medical supplies and we say, ‘Go that way.’” And that’s what Howard did. Boats sank. People died. The navy loathed the work. But pushing half a dozen boats back to Indonesia did make a big impact on the trade.

Howard was fearless in defence of … his constituency. He breached every decent tradition of the sea by refusing to land the men and women rescued by the Tampa and sent them off to Nauru. It was a dramatic message to an already dwindling trade, for the Taliban – the reason Hazaras were fleeing to Europe, America and Australia – had been contained by the Coalition of the Willing.

So the boats went away. Refugees weren’t drowning in the Indian Ocean. The detention centres were slowly cleared and family reunion resumed. We brought in more refugees from UNHCR centres abroad. That was all to the good. But were Australia’s borders more secure? Not in the slightest.

Rudd Mark I closed the camps on Manus and Nauru. These days the opposition calls that “putting the sugar back on the table”. Someone might remind Abbott and his spokesman for immigration, Scott Morrison, that the opposition under Brendan Nelson signed up to those reforms – only to renege under Malcolm Turnbull when the boats returned.

But Turnbull was a weakling. It took Abbott to work us up into a lather again over the boats. And he did it, insisting on the original toxic promise that a competent government, a patriotic government, must stop the boats. In the terms set by Abbott, terms long familiar to Australians and strange to Europeans, the arrival of a single boat is a mark of government failure.

So the barbarities returned. Malaysia was explored. Nauru and Manus were reoccupied. Family reunion ended. Applications for refugee status ceased. Thousands of asylum seekers were told they must wait indefinitely, forbidden to work, given enough support to keep them in poverty. And the boats came in record numbers.

Bogus asylum seekers must be weeded out and returned. The entry points of the trade – the airports of Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur – must be plugged, as the foreign minister, Bob Carr, has gone some way to do in the last week. The criminal combines driving the trade must be broken. We need to redouble the help we give Indonesian police. Australia must make it easier – rather than harder – for asylum seekers to come by air.

But when all this is done, refugees will still use the sea. They always have and always will. It’s a surprise to no one but Australians. And while both sides of politics in this country argue for the one extreme outcome – no boats at all – we will continue to be tempted by extreme solutions such as dumping all boat people in PNG.

That it’s brilliant politics is a mark of how debased the politics of the boats has become. At some point we’re going to look back on this with the discomfort we feel reviewing our immigration policy before the war and the White Australia policy that really only died when those boats came down crammed with Vietnamese refugees.

Meanwhile let's hope PNG doesn’t twig to what’s really going on here: we are paying it some enormous bribe and flattering the country to its face, while selling it to the world as the sort of place no one in their right mind, not even someone fleeing a well-based fear of persecution, would want to live.