Back to the future on offshore detention - Australia's political culture fails the test of leadership Part 2

Back to the future on offshore detention - Australia's political culture fails the test of leadership  Part 2

The meanness of spirit behind the base politics of punishing asylum seekers is finally starting to percolate through to the broader electorate. For a long time I could barely bring myself to look at and listen to the horror of our treatment of asylum seekers.

I once worked for a government that sold its soul to a devil. Our enthusiastic complicity in an illegal war, our rank hypocrisy in hectoring other countries about human rights, and our systematic violation of the rights of refugees was more than I could stomach; I withdrew gradually my services and then myself from the professional world I had inhabited for nigh twenty years.

I found myself in a fog of depression that threatened to destroy my life. Everywhere I looked I saw Islamophobia, sanguine apathy in the face of abject cruelty to our fellow human beings, bureaucratic solutions to human suffering. People I knew well were sprouting the poisonous stuff of ethnic demonization and the mindless slogans of hate and intolerance.

I set myself on a path of healing but I am constantly set back by the reality of hate politics; the mindless characterization of people on the basis of religion and/or ethnicity.

I kept thinking of two people I admired, and who had seen me through earlier difficult times, when a good friend was all that stood between me and dangerous depression. One of these great friends was a colleague who died in the Jog Jakarta air disaster; the other was a citizen of Iran who I met at University in India and who was unwilling to return home to a repressive regime. Both of these wonderful human beings were/are great humanists with a zest for life. Oh yes, and they were/are Muslims...

Morrison’s pseudo religiosity and hail fellow well met shtick clearly appeals to many of the 'me me journalists' and the crypto-Hansonite set but it makes my skin crawl. What does it say about the psychological health of a country that elects a political party that had as the centrepiece of its electoral pitch the punishment of a few miserable refugees? It beggars belief that in the 21st century our body politic can be so trivialised.

The dog whistling politics of the Coalition has come back to bite it on the bum. It is about time the sunshine was let in on this grubby corner of the extreme right's campaign to hold office on the back of fear and division. It's a Coalition speciality of course and those out there peddling this racial vilification stuff are doing its bidding.

The anti-Islam campaign has been festering within the bowels of the Coalition for a long time now…Morrison is seeking to hold office on a platform of unbridled entitlement politics, encouraging division, selfishness and 'get out of my way' pitches to people who think Government is about nothing more than serving their narrow interests. Labor has had to tip toe through an electoral mine field of electors easily in thrall to hate-mongering, which has become an acceptable political tool when you have little else to convince the electorate you are fit for government.