Shut up you incorrigible bunch of racists, before I'm forced to use the word Cronulla

How come day two of the asylum-seeker story always begins with a lecture from The Age?

Michelle Grattan yesterday:

A NEW dark era threatens to descend on Australia's asylum-seeker debate . . . it's the sharp, emotion-charged new focus to be put on asylum-seeker policy that must be the real worry. What a bitter irony. This dreadful loss of life should soften our hearts. Instead, there's a real risk it could harden them.

Richard Flanagan performs his patriotic duty in The Guardian newspaper on Thursday:

AUSTRALIA does have a dismal public life largely bereft of courage or humanity, and it has created a national myth that now poisons all sides of politics. The myth is that of the boatpeople. It is the idea that hordes of refugees will overrun Australia unless harsh policies of dissuasion and internment are employed. How a nation in which one in four is a migrant embraced such a cruel and stupid idea is mysterious.

Swamp-dwellers . . . Rob Oakeshott dons sackcloth and dashes in The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday:

WE have willingly damaged our economy as we've got stuck in the bog of an adversarial policy debate between John Howard and Kevin Rudd, and who is, or was, tougher on border protection. It lingers now with Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard.

Only yesterday I opened a Vietnamese art exhibition in Port Macquarie and the main topic of conversation at this event was concern within the Vietnamese Australian community about how much xenophobic fear and hysteria will be stirred up again by this tragedy, and the implications for business links. Our nearest neighbours are watching us closely. For economic as much as moral reasons, the Prime Minister must therefore lead and should start with a comprehensive statement of everything she knows about what exactly happened.

Gillard on Thursday:

I BELIEVE Australians are responding to these events today as human beings, they're seeing other human beings in distress and they're imagining to themselves, "how would I feel?"

Politicians ply their trade with callous disregard for repetition. Then opposition immigration spokesman Stephen Smith on March 5, 2004:

ON the last occasion that a boat reached Australian territory, the Howard government sent the people-smugglers back. They sent them back to ply their evil trade again.

Sharman Stone as opposition immigration spokeswoman on September 23, 2009:

THE Rudd government's soft approach on unauthorised arrivals is only encouraging people-smugglers to ply their evil trade.

Tony Abbott on July 6:

THESE policy measures we've announced today and the policy measures we've announced previously will send that unambiguous message that Australia is closed for people-smugglers [who] ply their evil trade.

Julia Gillard on The 7.30 Report on Thursday:

NO one should let the people-smugglers off the hook here. The people-smugglers who ply this evil trade, who seek to profit on human misery with callous disregard to human life.

Deep in the heart of Texas, Crikey's Bernard Keane takes a stroll on the grassy knoll:

WHAT of The Australian and journalists like Matthew Franklin, who has waged a campaign against the [BER] program? Or the ABC journalists happy to follow the News Limited line and parrot that the program was a debacle on par with the insulation program? The media doesn't like the construction industry . . . Maybe it's journalistic snobbery about manual labour. Or maybe it's because the only yarn from the construction industry that the media is interested in is about union thuggery. Particularly at The Australian, which led the charge in favour of the Howard government's assault on the CFMEU -- an assault that led to a systematic abrogation of basic civil rights, in the form of the ABCC, and a big rise in workplace deaths.

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