Miranda Devine, and a flexing of the tabloid muscles, while we wonder why the Liberal party went missing online ...

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Knock me down with a feather, preferably from a politician who's turned into a feather duster.

With the Liberal party providing a solid defensive block regarding information about the intertubes - what need of a filter when you have a service failure? - we trotted off to the Sydney Morning Herald, and there bold as brass, and conflating in the usual way, in a relentless quest for relevance, was Miranda the Devine.

Just we we thought it was safe to go out into the water, the sharks in the pond still serenely swim about. It's official - Columnist Miranda Devine returns, boasts the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, as Devine devolves back to her tabloid roots at a cool quarter a million or more a year - but here she is still haunting the Herald six days after that announcement, with Kiesha's shrine reminds us why her name must be remembered.

From the tone and quality of sentiment in the piece, the Devine is already limbering up for a tabloid outing.

She starts out with the pollies doing their Rooty Hill routine - as a way of showing she's writing about 'now' - before moving on to Hebersham and the disappearance of a child, the subject of a police investigation - as one does when conflating - and before too long, we arrive at this:

Left to their own devices, the locals have forged a strong sense of community and purpose. Drawn to Woodstock Avenue by pictures of Kiesha in the media, they talk non-stop about a little girl they never knew as police work inside the first-floor unit, carrying carpet and doors out to forensic vans

Uh huh. A little girl they never knew, lured by the media, and so a strong sense of community and purpose. If you can make sense of that little flurry of conflation, you're a better sentimentalist than most.

But how to link the single death of a child with the area's bizarre dedication to the Labor party?

Easy, because you see these flat featureless suburbs, with straight roads and myriad roundabouts, on a vast expanse of plain, are full of ugly people and criminals and junkies and law breakers, far removed, a world away from the other glamorous Sydney by the harbour, and so designed to make a reader shudder, as helped along by a shuddering sentimental Devine.

Only the cops and tabloid journalists pay attention. As for the politicians:

They belong, of course, to one of Labor's safest federal seats, Chifley. Smack bang between the marginal seats of Lindsay and Greenway which have been lavished with attention during this election campaign, Chifley has been ignored, as usual. Held by the retiring Roger Price, longest-serving Labor member in Parliament, it has been gifted to Ed Husic, president of the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union, who will likely achieve as much for his loyal voters as his predecessor. Not that the Liberal Party has treated Chifley with any more respect, selecting a candidate so woeful he had to be dumped last month.

What, no Howard battlers?

What follows is a litany of how much people care, and how people are proud to live in the suburb and how there are strong unprintable theories on the case doing the rounds, and then this:

Almost everyone has solved the case in their minds, and they discuss their theories endlessly, analysing the body language of Kiesha's mother, Kristi Abrahams, and stepfather, Robert Smith, on TV last week.

Uh huh. The tabloid heart beats strong in the Devine. What a clever nudge nudge. How to keep nudging?

Since telling police she woke up on August 1 to find Kiesha missing and fronting up to a media conference three days later in dark glasses and barely able to speak, she has scarcely been seen.

Yes that's a first class nudge. More nudging please:

The young mother and her family, including her six-week-old son, Levi, and three-year-old daughter, Brianna, have been staying in various motels. They returned briefly to pick up some clothes but missed a poignant ceremony in the park next door on Sunday, when about 200 people gathered to release balloons to guide Kiesha home.

But a tabloid write up wouldn't be complete without more caring and a little weeping and more caring:

"Isn't it a wonderful thought that so many people care? There's not a person here that wouldn't have taken that little girl home and looked after her … It's nice to think you are lighting the candles to show her the way home, but I think she's probably not coming back."

This needs to be backed up by simple-minded blather of a reinforcing tabloid kind:

The public grief of the people who lived around Kiesha in her six short years may seem curious to outsiders, but it is this community concern which is the most important protection for children in dysfunctional environments. It is rooted in instinctive notions of right and wrong, which are often clearer to those at the bottom of the heap.

Roll that sentence around on your tongue, with its instinctive stupidity, as if those at the bottom of the heap have some instinctive notion that guides them as regards what's wrong or wrong, as opposed to the middle or the upper bits of the heap:

It is rooted in instinctive notions of right and wrong, which are often clearer to those at the bottom of the heap.

We are but one step away here from the 'noble savage', though let's not pin that one on Rosseau, a routine that if applied by people to Indigenous folk or others low on the totem pole, would usually be skewered by the Devine as sentimental nonsense.

As befits a drop in, who having dropped in and written the column, will promptly drop back out, until the next column calls, and a trip into the myriad roundabouts is required, a false identification is a pre-requisite:

They might have jumbled families of their own, but they know where the ice addicts live, and they know in which families children are safe and in which they aren't.

When government bureaucracies and the rest of Sydney let them down, they have each other.

But then the mask drops, and the professional media bleat intrudes:

Of course, if police at some stage deem a crime to have been committed in relation to Kiesha, any mention of the little girl will be forbidden in the media.

Yes, and the foot in the door reporting of the commercial networks will stop, and the kind of voyeuristic exploitative guff being scribbled by the Devine will perforce have to stop as others are required to consider actual facts and circumstances, and the shock jocks will have to hold their tongues about the need to be tough on scum and crime.

And then how will the papers sold and the ratings hold up? What a sore test, what a lack of caring and sharing, what a lack of community:

Her name and photo will not be published and any sins against her will be forgotten, because of secretive laws enacted by the NSW government - aided by a negligent opposition - to evade proper scrutiny of its failed policies on child protection, under the guise of protecting privacy.

Repeat: Any sins against her will be forgotten ....

Yep, when confronted with the death of a child, the best the Devine can produce is treacly sentimental offensive innuendo laden nonsense, topped off by offensive gibberish ...

The laws will effectively extinguish the candles at Kiesha's makeshift shrine on Woodstock Avenue, just as they extinguish any outcry that should come if people hear of another child "known to DOCS" who has met a sad end.

What a pity the laws can't extinguish Miranda the Devine.

But as a quality piece of gutter trawling sensationalist claptrap, replete with innuendo of a safely legal kind - as a response to individual tragedy, however it might play out and whatever the police might conclude - the Devine has provided a perfect calling card for a return to tabloid journalism.

But then it's always been that way with the yellow press, with death always the perfect motivation for half baked speculation dressed up as sociological observation, and garnished with sentimental identification for the sake of a story.

Back in the day when I looked at the early twentieth century Australian media's love of crime and mystery, the subjects were likely to be the Gun Alley Murder, right in the heart of Melbourne, or the doings of Arnold Karl Sodeman.

But if voyeurism is your go, there's no need to rely on the Devine. The entire proceedings of the Old Bailey, London's central criminal court, from 1674 to 1913, are now on line, and you can frolic through the doings of the court and criminals, and also take at look at the Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts. Using 'transportation' and the appropriate search dates, you can also track the criminals who contributed to the start of Australia as a rather large prison.

Or not. You could always settle for reading the Devine's defence of the Catholic church in the matter of pedophilia, in Evildoers, not Pope, to blame.

Or not. You could always just batten down the hatches and wait for the Devine to move back to the tabloid heap.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure how to round out this piece. Perhaps a dictionary would help:

babbler, blab, blabbermouth, busybody, chatterbox, chatterer, circulator, flibbertigibbet, gossiper, gossipmonger , informer, meddler, newsmonger, parrot, prattler, rumormonger, scandalizer, scandalmonger, snoop, tabby, talebearer, taleteller, tattle, tattletale, telltale, whisperer

Take your pick.

And now since we have a portmanteau theme today:

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Ah to heck with it. Just show me where to vote.