Demon of charity and hope

Jowly, balding and sporting the unwanted middle-aged spread, Scott Morrison looks far older than his 42 years.

Still, that's not the reason to wonder how he has managed to look at himself in the mirror this week.

Morrison, chief scaremonger in Tony Abbott's hard-boiled half-baked Liberal Party, spends most of his time demonising the dark-skinned asylum-seekers who try to get to Australia on rickety wooden boats.

No surprises there. For almost a decade his party have played the most cynical of politics with boatpeople's lives, but never so offensively as the Opposition's immigration spokesman on Tuesday.

As babies, children and adults killed in the horrific boat wreck tragedy off Christmas Island were laid to rest in Sydney, Morrison railed against the Government for paying for their family members to be there.

A day earlier he suggested on radio they would all be going on sight-seeing trips after the funerals. The impression was of a jolly at taxpayers' expense.

Of course, TV footage from the graveside captured heartbreaking sorrow, images of devastated relatives slumped over a coffin the size of a cardboard box. It was no surprise that "these people", as Morrison's interviewer dismissed them, love and grieve just like the rest of us.

In Australia, we're well used to the commercial imperative that drives a shock jock's perpetual state of confected outrage.

Politicians are usually smart and responsible enough to know when to jump off the bandwagon. But not Morrison. Visit his website and you'll find a hard-working, successful, devoted "family man" guided by strong Christian faith. He believes in community and a "prosperous and generous" Australia. You'll find precious little charity extended to the desperate and dispossessed who flee persecution and war.

Those of a compassionate Christian bent might regard the A$300,000 ($398,500) spent on the funerals as a gift from a rich nation trying to help the tragic and less fortunate. They saw up to 50 fellow travellers die when the craft smashed onto rocks in December.

But the Labor Government is also culpable. The apparent humanity was tarnished by cruel conditions that kept mourning relatives apart, and saw them quickly flown back to Christmas Island's overcrowded detention centre.

Mealy-mouthed excuses will not justify the return of a nine-year-old boy to that remote abyss, particularly when relatives in Sydney can look after him.

It's all a consequence of the paralysis in a Government that has for too long lacked the courage to confront their opponents' knee-jerk populism. Julia Gillard criticised Morrison only after his Liberal frontbench colleague Joe Hockey led the way.

We read how Morrison unsuccessfully urged Abbott's shadow cabinet to capitalise on rising anti-Muslim sentiment; a message that strikes a chord in his electorate which includes Cronulla, the scene of the 2005 anti-Muslim race riots.

That these scare tactics have already enjoyed so much success - and sewn so much distrust - makes them no less sinister.

The depths to which he is willing to plunge suggests his motives are not limited to vote-collection. Hockey chose his words carefully when he said he would never deny a parent or child the chance to farewell a relative, whatever their faith or the colour of their skin.

Those comments struck at the deep ideological divide that splits the coalition.

Stung by near universal condemnation, Morrison is now engaging in half-hearted backtracking. But it won't be enough for many Liberals who place great weight on human decency and want to remove their party's ugly face altogether.