''Tony Abbott makes a beeline in my arse,'' says people smuggler Reza Kord on a secretly recorded phone call recently.

It's a particularly rude piece of idiom in the Farsi language, apparently, but just one of the unkind things being said about the new Australian Prime Minister among people smugglers and asylum seekers in Indonesia.

If Australia's aim was, in Julia Gillard's words, to ''smash the people smugglers' business model'', then the recent policy changes have done the job.

Smashing the model has fragmented it into a series of complex and expensive alternative options, proposals and pipedreams, which, even if they are possible, will never see the huge volume of people hitting Australia as we've seen in the past.

In Cisarua, it's Abbott copping the blame.