If you are tired of hearing about asylum seekers imagine how weary they must be.
Much of the analysis regarding asylum seekers does not seem to drive home the core truth: that the debate conducted by politicians is not really about solving the so called refugee problem. It is predominantly a show for an audience. It is a game of hardball.
That game is an old one played by tyrannical regimes throughout time and perfected under Nazism by Joseph Goebbels. First, demonise a group. Then you can progressively suspend their rights and use them to shore up your power.
Part of this denigration is achieved by holding back what might arouse common sympathy.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority's new Guidelines on privacy restrictions will prevent television networks filming asylum seekers arriving on our shores by boat. Jill Singer cites this as politically ominous and deliberate. Out of sight and out of mind. If people don't see the pain on the faces of refugees, concern and protestations will be lulled.
So much of the convoluted argument about what to do with boat people evokes the journeys of many persecuted groups. Their journeys are also our own, demanding moral self examination. What do we owe fellow humans from other lands who are fleeing war, persecution, torture and death?
The Geneva Refugee Convention of 1951, to which Australia is a signatory, has already supplied this answer. We have agreed that we owe refugees the right to seek asylum and we cannot send them back into danger. We must allow them to flee to our shores and shall receive them and hear and consider their stories and grant asylum to genuine refugees.
But the accusations of irresponsibility, queue jumping and terrorism characterise asylum seekers as less entitled. Portrayed at best, as powerless suffering victims, or at worst as invaders intent on stealing the benefits of our citizenship, the plight of refugees then invokes our most limited ways of thinking. Refugees are spoken of as unwanted goods to be sent back whenever possible.
Advocates and supporters are mocked as soft bleeding hearts who are responsible for deaths at sea.
So why are we deadlocked? Firstly the Geneva Convention has been ignored as though its principles were