Turns out the ALP Government paid the people smugglers too!
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.
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).
Just fantastic. So much for beating upon the government after that comes to light. Bill Shorten was doing the "won't deny that they did or did not get paid, but not to turn back boats" routine.
Was there a difference between the Coalition paying people smugglers on the water and Labor paying out on the land, he was asked?
"I'm not using the land-sea distinction. I am saying Labor has never paid people smugglers to turn back boats as it appears the Government has done," he said.
And, as Mr Shorten's face took on that green patina suggesting seasickness, there was this: "We don't know who paid what to where. When it comes to national security, there is bipartisan on that."
By which he meant no one talked about operational matters; and certainly not what ASIS might have done with great wads of secret cash when Labor was in power.
Which, he almost certainly saw by then, left him a pretext short of justification for demanding to know what the Coalition's secret operatives had been up to on the ocean.
And so the subject was allowed to sink without trace, as often happens when politicians find themselves at sea clutching at nothing more than a pot or a kettle.
Well that was most unedifying.
Part 4 - "Show Me The Money? I'll Show You The Money!"
And here it is!
Oh what joy.
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