Julia Gillard's decision to ask East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta to allow a regional processing centre on his island sounds familar — as familiar as John Howard setting up just such a camp on Nauru.

Turning the boats back, she says, is a shallow slogan that amounts to nonsense. And so it is. She makes no bones about Tony Abbott's claim that this is what he would do. The asylum seekers would simply sabotage their boats and Australian authorities would have to rescue them, she says. Shades of children overboard.

Gillard's whole approach is to stop the boats, however. The message she wants sent is that asylum seekers shouldn't get in boats in the first place.

And how is that message to be delivered? Get in a boat for Australia and you'll find yourself delivered to East Timor quick smart.

No matter how Gillard tried to couch her words, she is in John Howard territory.

"I want to wreck the people-smuggling business," she said bluntly.

She has a political problem and she wants to trump Tony Abbott. She wants to kill him softly, but there's no time for that. She just wants to kill him fast, and re-capture the territory he holds within the hysteria over asylum seekers.

Abbott upped the stakes significantly by announcing that any asylum seeker who arrived without documents would be presumed to have destroyed them and would be the denied the presumption of refugee status. Tough, but difficult to make workable. The Howard government proposed just such an idea and abandoned it after looking closely at it in 2004.