On Tuesday, the only question on the subject was a Dorothy Dixer to afford Julie Bishop a platform to nail Labor's apparent hypocrisy and confected outrage. And she did. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten on Tuesday. Credit:Andrew Meares Not only did Bill Shorten fail to pursue the matter in Parliament,he was all at sea when he addressed the media to "draw a line in the sand" on the government's pension changes. Why? Because, after demanding that the government give a one-word answer either confirming or denying the payments, he declined to do the same when asked if Labor in power had made payments to people smugglers. And it gets worse. After telling his caucus that Labor had made mistakes in this fraught area of policy and learnt "difficult lessons", he was unable to articulate what these mistakes were and how they would be rectified in the policy Labor will take to next year's election.

As Julie Bishop sees it, this failure is a product of tensions within the Labor party on what direction that policy will take, with the sections of the party determined to oppose aspects of the Coalition's extremely punitive, but successful, approach to stopping the boats – including turn-backs. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten on Tuesday. Credit:Andrew Meares Labor's shadow immigration spokesman, Richard Marles, is promising a better balance between border protection and humane treatment of those who ended up in Australia and in offshore detention centres, as well as a more concerted effort to build a regional approach. The detail may become clearer at next month's Labor national conference. Is this the end of the payments-to-smugglers issue? Hardly. Both sides of politics are guilty of using taxpayer funds to disrupt people smuggling ventures and both refuse to comment on the activities of Australian intelligence operatives abroad for obvious reasons. But only Labor has asserted that it has never paid people smugglers to turn around boats at sea (or put asylum seekers in new boats and pay the crew to take them back to Indonesia).

As Jewel Topsfield and Amilia Rosa's report from Kupang makes clear, this case would appear to take past conduct into a whole new realm. Never before have we seen pictures of thousands of US dollars apparently paid to people smugglers to return their human cargo to Indonesia. Loading Aside from the legitimate questions of safety raised by Indonesian officials are a host of legal, diplomatic and moral questions that demand answers, even if Labor is now too spooked to press them. Follow us on Twitter