German lore tells of a maid who threw herself into the Rhine in despair over a faithless lover and was transformed into a lorelei, a seductive siren whose songs lured fishermen to their destruction on the river’s treacherous rocks.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is Labor’s lethal lorelei luring boat people to buy a passage from people smugglers and traverse the perilous waters between Australia and its northern neighbours.

The unauthorised arrival by boat from Indonesia of 40 men originally from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh is the latest chapter in the endless saga of Australia’s not-so-sovereign borders. The men were dropped off and wandered through crocodile-infested mangroves before being discovered by a -remote indigenous community. This is the second unauthorised boat arrival in four months. Both groups were sent to Nauru as were eleven unauthorised arrivals intercepted at sea in September. Before that, Australia had not had to send any unauthorised arrivals to Nauru for nine years.

It was an opportunity for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to restate his firm principle that as with other Labor policies that have gone disastrously wrong on his watch, he was not to blame.

From the Voice to parliament to surging power prices and the skyrocketing cost of living, Mr Albanese has been resolute in refusing to take responsibility.

According to Albanese, it was not his fault because Operation Sovereign Borders ‘has been operating in exactly the same way’ under Labor as it did under the Coalition.

Sure, Mr Albanese. It’s exactly the same. Except that as per the annual report of the Department of Home Affairs for 2022-23, there was a 14 per cent decrease in flying hours compared with the previous year which just happened to be the last year of the Coalition government. Why? Because aircrews were ‘under-resourced’ which, hardly surprisingly, ‘affected aircrew availability’. In plain English, Labor cut the budget for aircrews which resulted in ‘the current decline in aerial surveillance hours’.

As Operation Sovereign Borders commander Brett Sonter has now revealed, his patrols have intercepted eleven asylum-seeker ventures since 2022. But for the first time in nine years, they have missed two.

While Labor was ‘under-resourcing’ border force aircrews, the people smugglers were also changing their tactics. Previously they sent their passengers on rickety boats that they knew would be seized and burned by Australian authorities. Now the people smugglers seem to be investing in faster boats so they can make it to Australia, drop off their cargo, and make their getaway, holding onto their vessel for future moneymaking voyages.

Yet the main reason that Operation Sovereign Borders is not the same under a government led by Albanese is that people smugglers don’t believe either Albanese or his hapless Immigration Minister Andrew Giles are committed to deterring unauthorised arrivals.

And with good reason. In 2015, at Labor’s national conference, Albanese voted against asylum seeker boat turn-backs explaining, ‘I couldn’t ask someone else to do something that I couldn’t see myself doing. If people were in a boat including families and children, I myself couldn’t turn that around’. But never mind, he claimed, because a future Labor government wouldn’t need to turn back any boats at sea because there wouldn’t be any boats to turn back. ‘Everyone in Labor wants to make sure there aren’t turn-backs because there aren’t boats.’ We’ve seen how that turned out and for the record, Penny Wong and Tanya Plibersek also voted with the left to ban boat turn-backs.

In April 2022, in the lead-up to the federal election, Albanese was questioned about his support for boat turn-backs and offshore detention. He claimed Labor ‘wouldn’t need’ offshore centres because it would deter boat people with turn-backs. Then minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton was astonished, noting that Albanese ‘doesn’t support temporary protection visas, which underpins the whole Operation Sovereign Borders. And the regional processing is a key element of the policy as well. You can’t just turn people around.’

Once elected, Labor duly abolished temporary protection visas promising to end the limbo for 19,000 people in Australia on those visas and the changes were anticipated to affect up to 31,000 temporary visa holders.

Labor Immigration Minister Andrew Giles also cleared the way for refugees on permanent visas who came to Australia by boat to bring family members to Australia.

This reversed Coalition policy whereby family reunion applications by refugee boat arrivals holding permanent visas were given the ‘lowest priority’ in visa processing under Ministerial Direction 80.

Giles replaced Ministerial Directions 80 and 83, opening a path for processing visas for tens of thousands of family members and doubled the number of immigration staff processing visas for individuals in complicated situations to meet the expected demand. Applicants from Afghanistan and Iran were expected to be the biggest beneficiaries.

‘The government is improving the family reunion pathways for these permanent visa holders,’ Giles said. In reality, what he was doing was improving the product people smugglers sell.

The last time Labor was in office tens of thousands of people flew to Indonesia and paid tens of thousands of dollars just for the privilege of attempting to arrive on the Australian mainland without authorisation. At the height of the chaos, there were 5,000 arrivals in one month. More than 50,000 – including 8,000 children – succeeded in making it to the mainland. All were put into detention, with the Rudd and Gillard governments forced to open new centres.

It was the last of these detainees that were released in November following the decision by the High Court which ruled that indefinite detention was unlawful. The Albanese government’s reckless response was to release the detainees into the community willy-nilly without effective monitoring.

The bombshell that the government unwillingly disclosed was that amongst the 149 detainees that were freed were seven murderers, 37 sex offenders, and 72 violent criminals – 16 with convictions for domestic violence and stalking – and 13 guilty of serious drug offences.

It was a gift to people smugglers who could argue that no matter how long you spent in detention, sooner or later you could still call Australia home. It also created a whole new product category of potential boat people – fugitives from justice who could avoid detention or the death penalty since Australia does not return people to countries with capital punishment.

Yet for all the attractions of unauthorised arrival under Labor, it was a lethal lottery ticket for at least 1,200 people. The journey in an overcrowded, unseaworthy vessel with no drinking water or ablutions ended in terror as the boats were torn asunder on treacherous rocks and the passengers drowned. And these are only the ones we know about. For literally countless others the cruel sea became an unmarked grave.

Albanese has been seemingly unable to understand that desperate people will risk their lives if there is the smallest chance of being allowed to access Australia so that sufficient surveillance, boat turnbacks, offshore detention and temporary protection visas are all vital components of effective deterrence. Labor’s lorelei continues to sings his seductive song and the boat people risk all to reach our shores.