Attempts to discourage the growing refugee flow escalated under Howard, Rudd, Gillard and Abbott. This unleashed a rush of misinformation from the more conservative media. The effective humanitarian argument was used by both major parties that stopping the boats would also stop the deaths at sea, which were the fault of the criminals who provided unseaworthy vessels. Shipwrecks of Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels (SIEVs) were publicized and this moral argument influenced Labor politicians especially. Others raised the counter point that locking up refugees for years in remote islands with no knowledge of their fates and long delays at processing, might not only be cruel, but also fatal, contrary to the UN Convention and liable to create rioting.

One ignoble lie was officially spread in October 2001. A broken-down refugee boat, officially called SIEV 4, with 223 people on board, was stopped by an Australian navy warship and then sent on its way. A man was reported as holding a life-jacketed child overboard. Through an exchange of official messages this became inflated to the untrue statement that refugees were throwing their children overboard. This myth eventually reached the prime minister's Department and prompted John Howard to state publicly that ‘I do not want people like this in Australia’. This was not unreasonable, if he accepted the rumour as true. However, a subsequent inquiry showed that it was not (Weller 2002). Media coverage was extensive and produced a strong reaction against asylum seekers, which the government did nothing to modify. The whole incident occurred against the background of an impending general election, which Howard won.

This myth and others like it survived and were widely used in defending the offshore internment policy. Liberal politicians persuaded their Labor counterparts that ‘saving lives’ was their priority, which was another noble lie. Of the 52,000 boat arrivals during the relaxed Labor rules of 2007, 98 per cent had arrived safely. Tragically, 2 per cent drowned because of unseaworthy boats, but this was not catastrophic enough to form the centrepiece of years of propaganda attacks on liberalization. If the Border Protection fleet could turn boats around (as it does) it could also return them to safety. In fact, under military-style secrecy, the ‘noble lie’ that mandatory detention had stopped the boats and saved lives became quite untrue.