SKETCH
Imagine, for a moment, that Australia's politicians suddenly got a galloping case of the George Washingtons.
"You know I can't tell a lie," a prime minister or a foreign minister or a minister for border protection would blurt, though it wouldn't concern something as benign as cutting down a cherry tree.
"We cut a deal with people smugglers," they might be cry. "We paid the buggers so they'd turn around and go away. That's what we do – we understand capitalism. Yes, and it worked."
A fantasy, of course.
Australia's ministers instead dodge and weave behind the wonderful confection of "operational matters", a term invented for times just like these by the former minister in charge of border protection, Scott Morrison.
Mr Morrison laid down the rules for obfuscation in September 2013, two weeks after the Abbott Coalition won the federal election. It was a master class.
The government, he offered, would announce how many asylum seekers arrived in Australian territory by boat, but it would never say anything about how many boats had been turned around.
"That goes to operational matters ... whether they affect current or future operational activity, you will not be getting commentary from this podium or that podium either way on those matters."
Morrison is the relatively cuddly Social Services Minister these days, but the current ministers responsible for things foreign and border protection must kneel daily and bless his groundbreaking linguistic cunning, particularly that bit about "operational activity" into the future.
Under more than a spot of pressure about whether Australia shelled out large wads of folding matter to persuade people smugglers to turn back their own boats and return their human cargoes to Indonesia, Border Protection Minister Peter Dutton and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop reached for "operational matters" faster than you could say befuddlement.
"As we have made very clear, we don't comment in relation to operational matters and when it comes to Operation Sovereign Borders, we remain absolutely determined to make sure that the boats remain stopped," said Mr Dutton.
Ms Bishop gave her operational matter an extra and slightly startling edge. Why, she said, Labor's own former PM, Kevin Rudd, had said when he was in government he wouldn't discuss "matters of intelligence and security for the obvious reason: we don't want to share with the world and potential aggressors."
Quite what this had to do with people smugglers or operational matters was not clear. Ms Bishop, anyway, wasn't going to share anything with Labor's current parliamentary aggressors, or admit to anything, either.
She could have pointed out that $30,000 for a boat was peanuts, considering both Labor and the Coalition had overseen the supply of huge payments to convenient warlords - all of them at least as nasty and often a deal ghastlier even than people smugglers - in Afghanistan.
But that would come at the very least under the combined heading of intelligence, security and operational matters: a step even further than a case of the galloping Washingtons.
Besides, the story of Washington confessing to chopping down the cherry tree was itself nothing more than a fable concocted by a hagiographer.
Truth seems lamentably elusive when accusations fly in the political world.
