Given the bizarre circumstances that gave birth to this minority government of ours, we should’ve anticipated some surprising policy outcomes. But this is up there with the weirdest.

After over a decade of watching our two main parties politicise the issue of asylum seekers who arrive by boat, we are actually waking up to a new era of onshore processing — against the wishes of both mainstream parties — and not only that, horror of horrors, letting more people into the community, providing bridging visas and granting them limited work rights.

The government has been quietly shifting asylum seekers into community detention for months now. But now they have to own that fact. It’s a strange and sad state of affairs when a government feels compelled to keep hush hush on a compassionate and highly effective policy — they’d say it was to ensure that a signal wasn’t sent to people smugglers, but there’s also politics at play.

We don’t doubt Bowen’s conviction on proposing a policy that he genuinely believes, and has been advised, will deter people smugglers and therefore save lives being risked at sea. But there is a great degree of self-justification after the fact at play here — more on the part of his prime minister. The moment Julia Gillard stood on board a coastal watch boat with David Bradbury for a photo op she put politics first when it comes to dealing with this diabolical policy problem.

Politics is at the heart of quietly slipping people into the community, politics is at the heart of treating people who arrive by boat differently to people who arrive by plane — and now, somehow, despite the best efforts of both major parties, politics has been taken out of the picture.

Both parties have their binoculars trained on the distant horizon — for essentially the same reason. They both want to blame each other for the next influx of boats.

To rest your political fate over an arbitrary number of boats that rises on the whims of domestic policy but, more importantly, the whims of global conflict, famine and natural disaster, is folly for both parties.

But they’re not just pinning their political fate on the cycles of global conflict and disaster — equally they’re pinning it on the whims of public sentiment. So as the parties wait and watch for the boats, the onus is on the public to show they are unconcerned by the idea of these people living and working within the community. That’s the only way to truly and irrevocably purge the politics from our global commitment to accept the right of people to seek asylum.