“It’s tremendously disappointing that we’re here again today fighting the same old battles that we thought that we’d won following a change of government,” said Victorian Senate shoo-in Dr Richard Di Natale as the Greens launched their refugee policy this morning at the tastefully rebuilt Flagstaff Gardens Bowls Club on the fringes of the Melbourne CBD.

Against the odds, Di Natale said, Australia has been dragged through another unedifying and internationally embarrassing debate that was meant to have been put to bed with Pauline Hanson’s move to Britain. But all was not lost. “The good news is the Greens are here,” he declared, in the amiable bedside manner he had greeted scores of patients over his medical career.”The good news is we are the antidote to all this discussion.”

Indeed, if Julia Gillard has been accused of self-consciously checking off a list of prickly issues to clear the decks for an imminent election, then the Greens in Melbourne have been gifted a similar checklist in reverse. Every recent Labor announcement on the RSPT (political economy), the ETS (ecology), the boats (humanity) and gay marriage (identity) has played directly into the party’s hands.

While the federal duopoly has used persecuted boat people as a “political football”, chimed in Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, the Greens were issuing a policy that was committed to a “long-term, practical and humane approach”.

“Unlike both the major parties we’re not interested in a race to the bottom on this issue,” she said.

Still, the marble floor, the Greens-branded plasma screens and delicious optics of the party’s two leading local lights will no doubt get the circulation pumping through the tofu-clogged arteries of Melbourne’s bleeding hearts. For the Greens, and especially Melbourne hopeful Adam Bandt, the issue is an slingshot to the top of the polls.

Not that they were letting on. Boats were “not an issue”, Hanson-Young said, and the Greens were simply channelling Thomas Paine by employing their own Bob Brown-approved version of common sense.

Bandt attributed the benefits of boat people in Melbourne to the dining benefits provided by Lygon Street, Carlton (pizzas) and Victoria Street, Richmond (pho) that would have been lost to Nandos forever were it not for WWII and Vietnam.

But the media triumph complete, what was in the policy? This would have been one of the easiest documents for the party’s strategists to craft, given that the answers on the non-issue have been apparent for 10 years.

The party would reprise its “community-based approach” for on-shore reception centres, the document declared, that are nothing at all like razor-wire jails.

An $8 million asylum-seeker support fund would help community organisations and the party would take the lead of the Refugee Council in increasing the nation’s annual intake to 20,000, with an extra 8,000 plucked from Indonesian camps. Children would never be held in detention, which would require the release of the current 498 minors currently in camps, and a judicial review process would let asylum seekers call in the courts to rule against their detention.

The party would abolish the Christmas Island and Curtin detention centres, with asylum seekers perhaps allowed to reside in those welcoming Carlton terraces with “refugees welcome here” signs in the windows.

Some execrable questions from a journo holding an MTR microphone about the possibilities of the Greens’ very reasonable policies “opening the floodgates”, and another from someone in a brown jumper curious as to just how many “less boats” would set sail under the Greens’ policies, underlines just how ugly things could become in the ‘burbs.

But the urbane trio didn’t appear concerned. As the mostly broadcast media pack broke up to file their soundbites, Bandt, Hanson-Young and Di Natale decamped for photo ops beside the mandatory green gum trees.