It became clear this week that repatriation flights for Australians stranded in India would have to resume ASAP after May 15, whatever the Covid situation in that country.
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Apart from anything else, by going too far in its effort to stop individuals using a third-country "loophole" to get home, the federal government made it impossible to keep shut the direct flight pipeline.
Cabinet's national security committee on Thursday approved the resumption. Three of the flights this month - the first leaving India on May 15 - will see arrivals going to Howard Springs. Another three federally organised flights will be bound for NSW, Victoria and Queensland. Commercial flights stay banned.
The government says arrivals from India will have become more manageable, with the "pause" providing time to reduce Covid overload in quarantine.
But also, Scott Morrison needed to escape the branding of his government as a moral pariah for denying citizens the right to return.
The attack Morrison had come under over the ban was justified, but its strength and breadth were still surprising.
The government would have anticipated criticism from the political left, however it's those on the right of the spectrum who have been among the most ferocious.
Morrison judged the "quiet Australians" were behind his action. Indeed, one Liberal MP says "80 per cent of the public think the Prime Minister is a star". After all, those premiers who closed their borders were heroes to their voters.
But objectively, circumstances are very different when we're talking about the national border, and excluded citizens who are in what amounts to a health war zone.
Even assuming the "quiet Australians" were with Morrison, he could not ignore the near-universal condemnation from a usually divided political class, and he would be disturbed by the sharp reaction from many in the local Australian-Indian community. Most voters will have long forgotten this issue by election time, but those Australians of Indian heritage will have longer memories.
Details about the Australians in India are scant, but we know the "vulnerable" among the more than 9000 registered citizens and permanent residents number 950. A Senate committee heard on Friday there are 173 children outside a family group.
After last week's cancellation of all flights from India until May 15, the real trouble for the government came when it went a step further - by invoking the Biosecurity Act and pointing to the act's penalties to prevent people coming via a third country.
The formal announcement was in a statement issued by Health Minister Greg Hunt, which hit inboxes in the early hours of last Saturday.
In subsequent days, Morrison tried to row back on the question of penalties. He indicated no one would be sent to prison, and declared it was the media, rather than he or Hunt, that had highlighted jail. The fact the penalty was spelled out in Hunt's media release was "simply a statement of what the Biosecurity Act does", he said.
But the government could have left the penalties out of the statement - and made it clear, to those who asked, that it was not on a punitive mission.
For a government so obsessive about controlling its messaging, it is very poor at injecting some subtlety into it.
Indeed, it let its ban appear even worse than it was.
That late-night statement said no one could arrive in Australia who had been in India in the preceding 14 days - meaning there was still an indirect long, slow way home (which would land someone here after May 15 if they had left India as soon as the ban came into effect).
Thus former Test cricketer Michael Slater - who has lambasted Morrison on Twitter - is in the Maldives serving out this period. Most of the Australian cricketers have followed him, after their competition was suspended.
On the other hand, most people caught in India don't have the resources of elite cricketers, and so the option of 14 days in another country was a theoretical one only.
One interesting issue in the use of section 477 of the Biosecurity Act is how the political and the medical elements interacted.
As the chief medical officer, Paul Kelly, noted in his advice to the government, this would be "the first time that such a determination has been used to prevent Australian citizens and permanent residents entering Australia".
Kelly told the ABC "we were requested to provide advice" on the use of the act - the initiative came from the government.
"There is a particular section under the act which requires that the minister, before he makes a decision, is provided with advice in relation to several matters," Kelly said.
These include that a ministerial decision must be proportionate, no more restrictive than required, and in place only as long as needed.
Kelly gave the necessary ticks.
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But in his written advice, Kelly went out of his way to spell out bluntly what could be the bad outcomes of the decision, while arguing they could be mitigated. He covered his back.
"I wish to note the potential consequences for Australian citizens and permanent residents as a result of this pause on flights and entry into Australia," he wrote.
"These include the risk of serious illness without access to health care, the potential for Australians to be stranded in a transit country and, in a worst-case scenario, deaths."
Apart from the political pressure, one reason the government was anxious to have a plan in place for some, albeit limited, resumption of repatriation from India is that the legal challenge against the government's action is in court early next week.
And given the agitation among crossbenchers and even some in his own ranks, Morrison also wanted to cool this issue, which has flamed out of control, before the start of budget week.
- Michelle Grattan is a press gallery journalist and former editor of The Canberra Times. She is a professorial fellow at the University of Canberra and writes for The Conversation, where her columns also appear.