Janet Albrechtsen and inner city urban elites doling out the cliches about walking the talk ...

(Above: elite instant coffee? You're kidding right?)

Here's the way to sort out regional issues.

Send in an army to kick the shit out of insurgents and trouble-makers, and in the process incidentally do the indigenous population over.

Make sure you strip the civilian population of arms, so that they're forced to choose between the pathetically weak government and warlords for some kind of protection against the troubles they face in troubled times from insurgents, rebels and imported ratbags (do not pause to reflect on the irony of American soldiers doing this, as opposed to life in the United States, where libertarians blather on about the right to open and concealed carry of anything up to a bazooka as a right enshrined in the constitution, and where any attempt to take away arms is conceived as a communist plot of the first water).

Make sure the troops act as an exemplary role models for an alternative way of life in a faraway lucky country, do nothing effective to protect those who fall out with warlords or insurgents, and then stand back and wait for boat people to arrive. Unless you happen to provide a handy overland route to Europe ...

Next make sure that you have commentariat commentators on standby domestically to generate controversy over queue jumpers and boat people.

Preferably they should have a cheap meaningless cliche in their headers.

How about Tough talk Julia, now walk the walk, as scribbled by Janet Albrechtsen for The Australian? And as a counterpunch, how about the header for Amnesty's outing in The Punch, Gillard talked the talk on refugees, walks with a limp.

Here on the pond, we call on politicians to talk while walking a talking kind of walk, with double flip and pike, and also rub their belly at the same time.

Albrechtsen's piece is, of course, as you'd expect, a standard sort of fear mongering piece, replete with the usual kind of guff about what - in statistical terms - is a very minor affair.

Boat people, as they're unkindly dubbed, are a minor part of immigration numbers, and comparitively small in number up against the inflow of legal and illegal immigrants in other parts of the world.

But they make a great subject for dog whistling, and fear politics, and as usual, Albrechtsen knows how to maintain the rage and the wedge, while purporting to do an objective study of the wedge:

It's hard walking the line between the inner-city white-collar Labor voters who favour soft borders because they don't have to deal with the consequences of immigration and the battlers in the outer suburban seats who favour stronger borders because they do.

When, on the weekend, the new Prime Minister called for an end to political correctness stifling an open debate about immigration, it was immediately denounced as dog whistle politics. The Gillard government was taking the "low road", said Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young.

Such piety, such concern on the part of Albrechtsen. And as usual it's all the fault of the latte sipping, chardonnay swallowing inner city dwelling elite, as opposed to the battlers who live in the outer suburbs, and who perforce deal with the real world problems. For starters, they don't know how exhausting it is to search for the perfect coffee...

I keed, I keed, the real problem is that they never have to deal with the outrageous slurs and calumnies by commentariat commentators on a daily basis. Hey true blue, think yourself bloody lucky, you salt of earth digger, you, truly cobber, dinkum mate ...

You see, when the wretched Albrechtsen - a highly paid commentator who lives high on the hog of Rupert land - goes on about city dwellers, she's actually going on about herself. Except of course some city dwellers are good, because they understand the pulse of the wild outer west, and some are baad, because they don't.

Show me a commentariat commentator who's a teetotaling coffee abstaining common kind of folk with a taste for meals at the local bowling club, and I'll show you a unicorn. Or perhaps a griffin.

The wedge of course comes from the right, who just love their fear mongering, and aren't averse to a little revisionism along the way. Here's Albrechtsen fondly remembering the Howard years:

For all the emotional hysterics directed at Howard about immigration, it was never founded on facts. The former Liberal prime minister defused Hanson with a sensible, non-discriminatory policy that allowed Australia's immigration intake to double from 70,000 in 1996 to almost 140,000 by 2007. But that increase depended on an orderly immigration process and strong border protection measures: the Pacific Solution and temporary protection visas drastically reduced the number of boats arriving on Australian shores.

Ah, so that's why folks in the outer west are feeling the heat! Because of the increased immigration indulged in during the Howard years. Because of course up against boat people, it's the legal immigration that puts pressure on infrastructure and suburbs with a lower socio-economic mix. And also provides plenty of juice for the economy, and people ready to do jobs the true blues turn up their collective noses at ...

Gone and forgotten and scrubbed from the Howard record are the punitive prison-like measures that led to the mouth-sewing and the misery and the abject despair as a selfish country indulged in a bout of selfishness. To no meaningful effect, except to keep politicians in power, as the boats kept coming, and will keep coming ...

Of course you could do more to stop illegal immigration by simply rounding up all the English, Irish and European backpackers overstaying their visas, but that raises awkward questions involving racism, so let's not go there.

Instead let's retreat to the safe haven of blaming it all on the urban elites, perhaps with a dash of empty moral posturing about the essential truth and goodness of blue collar workers:

Last year when head of the Australian Workers Union Paul Howes questioned whether tougher border protection discouraged boat arrivals and suggested "we should put out the red carpet" for illegal immigrants, he summed up Gillard's problem.

Remember that Howes is a vocal and very public Gillard backer. He relished his role in installing the new PM. And while, in a predictably neat twist of irony, the union leader doesn't speak for his blue-collar members about border protection, he does echo the inner-city sophisticates who are so disconnected from the rest of Australia.

Yep, you see, only commentariat commentator and right wing well paid hacks for Chairman Rupert are wired right into the rest of Australia. Even if they're one of the urban elite. No not the baad urban elite, the good one, the kind that trained as lawyers, sat on the board of the ABC, and thinks the big banks are wonderful. (Try telling that to a bank user in Bankstown).

Urban elites never understood the significance of Howard's assertion in 2001 that we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come. For them, assertions of national sovereignty about border control are just the ravings of Burnside's marginal seat rednecks.

Unlike the ranting and raving of hysterical right wing pundits and their posturing:

Alas empty moral posturing about open borders is not compassionate policy. As Gillard said yesterday, compassionate policy means shutting down the ghastly trade that leads to tragedies on the open seas. It means recognising that softer borders bolster the risk-reward trade-off for canny people smugglers who respond to lax immigration policies in the same way any savvy businessman looks for regulatory arbitrage. Compassionate policy recognises the competing claims of the voiceless refugees waiting in camps with no access to salivating activists in the media.

Well let's see how compassionate it is to turn boats back at sea, to allege that people who have no papers have destroyed them, and so will be put on a plane back to who knows where and so on and on, as politicians try to out-tough each other, all in a bid to win marginal seats.

You know, there's a funny irony in all this. We are mostly boat people, or descended from boat people, from the first Australians to the last, unless you happen to have benefited from planes, and it's easy enough to think of them as a kind of aerial clipper.

In her last years, my mother formed an attachment to one carer, who happened to be an Islamic immigrant. It's true there was a touch of the exotic about the attachment - a kind of boasting, look I have an Islamic Arabic carer and golly I've discovered I'm actually okay with that, for all the talk of me being prejudiced - but in the end, common humanity and compassion won out, with a quiet agreement not to talk the talk or walk the walk when it came to the matter of religion.

You'd hope and expect that common humanity and compassion would win out in Australian politics, and that there'd be a bipartisan approach to what is a world-wide problem, since there are many more asylum-seekers than countries willing or equipped to deal with them. But no, the politicians love their dog whistling, and the commentariat is always standing by ready to dog whistle along with them.

I can't imagine the despair or the courage required to up stumps and leave a country like Afghanistan, and set off on a leaky boat to a new country in search of security and a quiet life.

Only to be met by the likes of Janet Albrechtsen personning the barricades, while at the same time urging on the war in Afghanistan. Oh and throwing around the adjectives:

Gillard's bigger policy - her Timor Solution - is a long way off. No quick fix, as she said. The question is whether Gillard, unlike Rudd, has the guts to buy into a real fight with deluded human rights activists and misnamed progressives within her own party by adopting a sensible, controlled immigration policy demanded by middle Australia, a policy that lasts longer than an election campaign.

Actually the bigger question is whether the likes of Albrechtsen will ever realise the stench of hypocrisy and the nauseating contradictions in their sundry policy stances, and the wretched easy stupidity of mounting class divisions between elites - of which they're a part - and ordinary people about whom they simply, in their glass walled right wing conservative ivory towers, don't have a clue.

Does it grate a little dear? Yep, when latte sippers are blamed for the rise of Hansonism, I'm afraid I choke on my coffee:

Indeed, when members of the so-called progressive Left talk about compassion and red carpet open borders for boat people, they forget their own complicity in the rise of hot-headed Hansonism. The arrival of some 8000 people aboard boats in the late 1990s - not to mention the stifling political correctness that rejected an open debate about immigration - undermined support for increased numbers of immigrants. Enter Pauline Hanson.

Bugger me dead, Albrechtsten could easily get a job doing history revisionism 101 for those who've forgotten the past. Pauline Hanson all the fault of progressives? And John Howard had nothing to do with it? Pass the soap to that woman, she needs to wash out her mouth.

Meanwhile, let's not forget who was actually responsible for what we might dub our current Afghanistan activities. It's called the fireworks foreign policy - light taper and attempt to stand well clear.

Yes, that's the sort of policy soundly endorsed by an inner urban sophisticate who scribbles for The Australian, one of the chattering yapping yabbering urban elite who postures and pontificates for Chairman Rupert. A pox on them all ...