Even those Australians who are not concerned at the ease with which people smugglers can now defeat Australia's border security and refugee policies have cause to worry about the Gillard Government's Malaysia-friendly asylum seeker exchange agreement.
That's unless you are a taxpayer with bottomless pockets - or a voter without moral scruples.
It brings the issues starkly into focus if you look at this agreement simply as a business deal between two countries.
Before people scream that such an analysis would be insensitive because human lives are involved, they should remember it was this Labor Government that started the live export trade in stateless people.
Whatever misgivings they might have about the Hawke, Keating or Howard governments' treatment of asylum seekers, only this Prime Minister - kept in office by the Greens - has physically used people as real pawns in a two-way trade.
The going rate in this deal is one asylum seeker in Australian waters for every five long-term Malaysian-based refugees.
And we're told it comes at a cost of $292 million - but if you believe that, you'll believe anything.
No one has ever been able to explain how the one-for-five exchange rate was formulated. Round one to the Malaysians.
Layer two of this deal is that Australian taxpayers not only pay for the transport of the asylum seekers from here to Malaysia - which is reasonable - but we also pick up the tab for their extended existence in that country at the back of the refugee queue.
And that's not so reasonable.
In the raw arithmetic of business, the Malaysians will receive a net benefit by getting 3200 souls off their books.
At no cost to them.
The deal also raises uncomfortable questions about when we withdraw our financial support from those we have dumped in Malaysia - and what effect that will have in a country that is not a signatory to the international refugee convention and which has a dismal human rights record.
The third element of this farce lies in the inevitable court challenge to the deal, which is now under way. Australians are not only paying to fight the challenge in the High Court, but the Gillard Government is also funding the Melbourne-based Refugee and Immigration Legal Centre which is mounting it - to the tune of about $1.3 million a year.
So every way Australian taxpayers turn in this deal they are stiffed. It's simply all downside.
On the day he announced his deal in May, Immigration Minister Chris Bowen was asked a very pertinent question on the ABC's Lateline program: Why is Australia paying for both ends of this deal if it's mutually beneficial?
"Well, because this is Malaysia assisting Australia to break the business model of the people smugglers," Mr Bowen said.
"We can now very clearly send the message to people: don't bother getting on a boat to come to Australia, don't risk your life, don't pay the money, because you'll be returned to Malaysia, which is the first entry point into Asia for most asylum seekers that come to Australia."
Some 560 people arrived between the time Mr Bowen made that comment and the date he signed the agreement.
Another 100 have arrived on two boats in the two weeks since the deal was inked - and another boat is reportedly on the way to Christmas Island.
Anyone still not moved by the sheer financial imbalance of this deal or its squalid trade in human lives, must surely be concerned at the portents displayed in the first two days of skirmishes in the High Court.
The refugee advocates always had fertile grounds for an appeal over the Immigration Minister's difficulty in sending unaccompanied juveniles to Malaysia, given that he becomes their lawful guardian when they arrive in Australia.
Arguing it is in a child's best interests to be sent to Malaysia rather than accepted in Australia will be difficult, even for someone as slippery as Mr Bowen.
But the case at the moment is being fought solely on the lawful claim for asylum of 16 of the adult males who arrived on the first boat and have been held on Christmas Island.
The legal principle on which Justice Kenneth Hayne granted their injunction on Sunday is important.
He noted that the men's asylum claims would be defeated entirely if they were sent to Malaysia and concluded he merely had to be satisfied their arguments were not "necessarily without merit".
Which he was, since referring to the Government's case as "half-baked" and noting the Malaysia deal posed "sufficient serious questions".
This case could take as long as six months before judgment, holding up Mr Bowen's planned live export trade from Christmas Island to Kuala Lumpur.
But Australia will start receiving the first of the 4000 refugees from Malaysia this week.
In the meantime, the boats will clearly continue to come and those passengers the Government wanted to trade with Malaysia will mount up in limbo on Christmas Island.
And here's a question.
If the Malaysia deal is found to be unlawful, will it mean the Gillard Government has been caught out trying to do a bit of people smuggling of its own?
