We are told they have stopped the boats. But one was taken back to Vietnam only last week. How many were taken back to Sri Lanka, or Somalia, or Fiji, we may never know.

We are told that, in the nick of time, we were saved from "young terrorists" blowing up Anzac Day in Melbourne. And then we are told that Anzac Day will be "perfectly safe" and we should turn up in our hundreds of thousands, our millions, to watch, on the main streets of our towns, the hundredth exultant celebration of this national holy day.

We are told that 8,000 Australians will be safe on Gallipoli, though DAESH is just down the road and a couple of their drones could kill 500 of us, in that crowd, at dawn, on Friday.

We are told that domestic violence is a "high priority", though money that might have saved Luke Batty was cut in the months before his death at his crazed father’s hands.

We are told we are in constant mortal danger of terrorist attack, on whose prevention we are spending billions, though only one person, Tory Johnson, has died on our soil in a hundred years at the hands of a "terrorist" and two a week die from domestic violence and almost 300 a day from smoking. Redback spiders have killed 300 times as many Australians in this last century as terrorists, sharks 100 times as many, backyard pool drownings 90 times as many.

Some deaths, it seems, are more serious than others. Though a boy like Luke who was beaten to death by his father is just as dead as a journalist beheaded by DAESH, we should think only of the latter, and invade, once more, Mesopotamia in response to it.

Abbott’s avid embracement of what might be called the post 9/11 "death cult" – the reverencing and sacredisation and canonisiation of those killed in certain international incidents – is one of the principal tricks of his administration.

When a plane is shot down – by, it seems, Ukrainians, not Russians – he proposed to "shirtfront" Putin if he did not call off a war while some of our soldiers scavenged for the corpses of our glorious dead in a field of sunflowers. And he made a day of national grief, in, of course, a Catholic cathedral, though none of the dead were Catholics, rather than asking why the fuck that plane was over a war zone in the first place and proposing to gaol the EU bureaucrat that put it up there, in harm’s way.

Death has been good to Abbott and he made sure, by refusing the hostages’ phone call, there would be more dead on his watch, in the Lindt Cafe, that he could grieve over also. If Australians die on Gallipoli on Friday it will be, if he survives, a bonanza he can call an election on. It has always been his plan. An Anzac force under fire in Iraq on the hundredth anniversary. And then, with luck, on Gallipoli itself, a tribal conflagration.

The other big lies include a "debt and deficit disaster", though there was no recession and our figures after the GFC were the best in the world.

This was followed by a promise to have us back in surplus by 2017, a date that has been put back by fifty years.

Another one was that David Hicks, though cleared by the U.S. Supreme Court of all wrongdoing and found by them to be wrongly tortured, and isolated, and made mad for five years, was "up to no good" and undeserving of any compensation, or any income from his autobiography.

The lies are too numerous to list, and number ten or more every day in these columns. They are Guinness Book Of Records lies, and they keep coming and coming.

And so it goes.

The Abbott Government's big lies