Tony Abbott, iron pyrites and hypocrisy of a high order

(Above: now that the original Liberal cheshire cat - Peter Costello - is leaving parliament, is it the business of Tony Abbott to step up to the plate?)

The abject futility of finding meaning in a smarmy politician's chatter is given cogent force by reading Tony Abbott.

Any time on any subject - but this week on boat people as he value adds by blogging for desperate to charge for politician's musings Chairman Rupert, under the header Rudd's desperate on boatpeople issue:

Before the election, Mr Rudd said that “another great challenge of our age is asylum seekers. The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst”. Now, he calls the people who help asylum seekers to get to Australia “vermin” and the “vilest form of life”.

Well yes, Chairman Rudd likes to have it both ways - all politicians do - and there have been some sharp edged reminders of his hypocrisy, most notably by Michael Epis under the header Rudd's hero, the people smuggler.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian put to death for his complicity with those who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler, was ''a theologian, pastor and peace activist ... a man of faith ... a man of reason'' - and a people-smuggler. As Rudd himself wrote further in the October 2006 edition of The Monthly, Bonhoeffer ''organised the secret evacuation of a number of German Jews to Switzerland''.

In that essay, in which Rudd reveals himself as a clear thinker who can write, he argues thus: ''Another great challenge of our age is asylum seekers. The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst.''

It is the combination of these two assertions - that Bonhoeffer smuggled Jews to safety and the acknowledgement of the obligation owed to the vulnerable stranger - that makes the panic of Rudd's government over the arrival of more asylum seekers so dismaying. For Rudd knows better.

Well that puts Abbott on safe turf when he accuses Rudd of hypocrisy:

Even by the standards of politics, the Prime Minister is a shameless hypocrite who wants people to believe that he has a border protection policy that is both hard-line and humane. He wants to be Mr Tough Guy on the boats and Mr Nice Guy on their occupants.

But then Abbott can't help himself. He just has to prove that he's a shameless hypocrite too, of the Christian kind:

John Howard found a problem and created a solution. Kevin Rudd has taken a solution and created a problem. That’s why he sounds so shrill and desperate on this issue.

So what's Wilson Tuckey sound like? The mad uncle who suddenly escaped from the attic and is now barnstorming around the house as if he's in an episode from The Munsters, playing Sam Dracula? With all this talk of terrorists? As if a half way decent terrorist couldn't find a more direct route into the country than catch a leaky boat with women and children, and without any obvious means of support or useful weaponry?

Sadly there are a bunch of hardline fundamentalist ratbags in the opposition who think reviving the John Howard solution will be an effective way to derail Chairman Rudd. But the Howard solution - contrary to Abbott's pious wishes - led to images of children behind razor wire, lips being sewn up, and pathetic solutions involving desperate politicians on a remote island in the Pacific. Fear mongering isn't the way forward, unless you think living in fear is a solution, in a gulag run alternately by Chairman Rudd and Chairman Turnbull.

Now it seems that Indonesia is being fitted up as another solution, when this is not just a regional matter, but a world-wide issue.

If ever there was a case for bi-partisan policy making, then surely the removal of the issue of boat people from the ruck of grubby, muck-raking politics is it.

But Abbott's just another hypocrite and a grubby one at that, with whatever veneer of Catholicism he adopts just designed to hide the pine heart beneath.

Sensibly he's kept his live blogging on the subject to 5 pm this Friday, which is a bit like the strategy of releasing a company's financial results on Melbourne Cup day (unless you're Qantas and happy to release the pork barreling of Geoff Dixon in a brazen display of defiance, just to keep the possum shareholders stirred and ready to end it all by hopping on a Jetstar flight).

But there's no doubt when he does get around to his web-spinning with the punters Abbott will contrive to be both caring and tough, emulating Chairman Rudd, when fear-mongering and stirring is really the name of the current game.

And unfortunately while he and the mad uncle roam about, warning of the dangers of following the bible's injunctions, while injuncting us to follow the bible, the number of moderates amongst the Liberals gets smaller or stay silent in the face of the drum beaters.

You can still hear a few of them, but not for long as the best toddle off into the wilderness, leaving those intent on a corrosive debate still in our midst.

Here's Petro Georgiou on the debt detention bill, which barely passed, though it was designed to fix a political disgrace organized by the two main parties, and here's Georgiou on Razor wire returns in The Age a week ago:

Unless we are very careful, we are about to engage in a corrosive debate about people seeking refuge in our country. The portents are there. Political skirmishing is intensifying about who is tough, tougher or toughest on border protection. The term "illegal immigrant" is being bandied about. Refugees are being labelled "back-door" immigrants. Anecdotes about asylum seekers not looking genuine are being recounted. Unsubstantiated assertions about the number in asylum seeker ''pipelines'' are being given currency.

When Georgiou retires from the Liberal party, we will be left with the likes of the callow corrosive Abbott. That feels like being left with iron pyrites while the real gold washes downstream and ends up lost amongst the pebbles ...

It'd be nice to think of Abbott as a clod, but while prattling on in his usual unctuous way about how much he cares, he ends up sounding like a prize pebble:

"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a heaven in hell's despair."

So sung a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

"Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven's despite."

(Below: a few more images harvested in our search for the best Abbott cheshire cat moment, and a Nicholson cartoon, with more Nicholson available here. Search for 'Abbott' on his page and you'll get a plethora of mad monk jokes).