Scott Morrison, and how a trip to Malaysia can result in the notion that opening the mind is exactly the same as closing the mind ...

(Above: an artistic view of the Petronas towers, the pond's contribution to digital visual waste on the intertubes).

Making politics out of human misery and despair is about as low as it gets in the political cycle, and the political machinations deriving from Scott Morrison's jaunt to Malaysia are a pretty piece of work.

It was always going to be that way, but let's count the nauseating ways.

First an assumption. Most people, unless they tend to live under the fairy tree at the back of the garden (along with the fairies), understand that in many south-east Asian countries, whether for example Indonesia or Malaysia, you don't have to stray far off the beaten track to discover extremes of wealth ... and extremes of poverty.

In Kuala Lumpur, you can go from the brand-laden, up to the minute mall at the base of the Petronas Twin Towers to festering streets laden with garbage and the stench of sewage, with people clustered in small dank spaces that pass for concrete cancer-laden, tropical rain battered apartment blocks, and you can do it in a half hour walk.

You can sit down for lunch with Basil, and yes Mr Fawlty, he ain't a hamster. And that's for people legally in the country ...

Along the way you might pass the beer swill pits for foreign tourists, and the street women of Bukit Bintang, suggesting that between the desire to uphold Islamic principles and the desire to gouge hard cash from decadent tourists, the cash will win every time... and that KL at least in places isn't far from Bangkok.

If you head down to Titiwangsa, you can catch the strange sight of one of the head Buddhists swanning around in a handsome black Mercedes, driving through the squalor and the garbage and the blackened concrete apartment blocks of a little India to a very tidy monastery ...

Apparently all this is news to Morrison, as piously explained in Squalor, hopelessness may bring sense to policy debate on refugees:

The breaking point for Scott Morrison came as he sat in a 3m x 2m room in Selayang with a father who had lost all hope.

He was dumbfounded as he listened to the story of a Burmese refugee who had been beaten by life as an illegal immigrant.

A family of four pays 200 ringgit ($62) a month to rent the small room. Across the entire floor, 60 refugees squeeze in every night.

There is no sanitation and the smells wafting from the street are unlike anything Morrison has encountered near his home in Sydney's south.

The sight of Morrison and his two Liberal Party advisers walking through a local slum market may never be repeated.

Before he left, Morrison gave some cash to the refugee.

"The hopelessness and helplessness of these people is something I completely underestimated. This guy is just completely beaten by it," he said.

Here, take a handout from the man who quibbled over the 'unreasonable cost' of taxpayers funding families attending funeral services for victims of December's Christmas island disaster (here).

Where to start?

Well you could replay this story featuring any number of Malaysian citizens struggling against poverty, a lack of education, living in small, cramped, crowded rooms, and suffering a lack of basic services and sanitation. And if you go outside KL, multiply that by ten.

Tossing some cash at a single refugee, or a down at heel actual citizen doesn't do anything for the situation, except perhaps for the moral humbuggery and piety of the tosser ...

According to the tag at the end of the story, there's a morally uplifting conclusion to Morrison's stunt:

Morrison, who travelled with a senior policy adviser from Abbott's office, will sit down with his leader to thrash out a more focused approach to battle the people smugglers.

Instead of banging on about the Nauru Solution the expectation from this trip is some more focused policy from the Coalition.

Uh huh. Bear that in mind as we wander down this sordid parth.

No doubt that explains why last night Scott Morrison went on the ABC's 7.30 Report, and ...

... banged on about the 'Nauru Solution' yet again, as recorded in Scott Morrison's Malaysian visit.

As if calling something a 'solution' makes it a solution. As if Nauru is somehow going to fix poverty in south east Asia, or discrimination against minorities, or the war in Afghanistan, or the tendency for people to want to leave Iraq or Ian ...

In the process, Morrison performed some incredible verbal gymnastics, explaining how his criticism of living conditions in Malaysia wasn't a criticism of the Malaysian government, but a criticism of the Australian government.

And in the process, Morrison painted the "Nauru solution" as a kind of idyllic bliss, a paradise for refugees, and surely a profound inducement for boat smugglers to do their thing:

SCOTT MORRISON: I think they should be processed humanely and on Nauru that will occur. Every child on Nauru will go to school. Every person will have access to public health care. Every person who goes there will have programs sand actives, meals, accommodation, they will have all of their needs meet for the entire time they are processed and those who ultimately get a resettlement will get a resettlement and those who don't will return home as it happened last time. Forty-three per cent of the those who went through the Pacific Solution last time went through Australia. The balance went to other countries or went home.

Indeed. Now all we need is a promise that no refugee child on Nauru will live in poverty by 2015. But how handy to know that if you can get on a boat and endure the "Pacific solution", why surely you stand an almost fifty-fifty chance of ending up in Australia anyway. Now there's a knock me down deterrent ...

This is where the bizarreness of the current policy debate has led us, to the Alice in Wonderland notion that parts of Australia aren't Australia, that Nauru is a symbol of humane treatment, yet the only way to stop the people smugglers plying their trade is to toughen up the barriers, which should be the Malaysian solution, since indeed it toughens the barriers, but we can't do that because it's inhumane and so instead we should settle for the inhumanity of installing people on a remote island out of sight and mind, not that it's inhumane, but it has to be inhumane to stop the people smugglers because it ...

Never mind. It's called the gotcha in political debate.

Let's be nice to refugees? Hah, what are you some kind of mamby pamby liberal latte softie?

Let's be hard on refugees? What are you, some kind of evil hearted Malaysian bureaucrat armed with a rattan cane, determined to make people live on the smell of a bowl of rice once a week?

Here's how Morrison does it:

... for 10 years the Labor Party demonised John Howard. They said our policies were too harsh. Now we have a Prime Minister who says that they were too soft. She wants to be more harsh. She wants to punish people. That's her policy and I say to those on the Labor backbench the challenge the Howard Government for years to stand up because at the moment they're glued to their seats and if they don't stand up on this issue well, frankly, I think they've betrayed their own principles.

But of course as soon as the Labor party stands up for its alleged principles (principles notably absent when the Labor controlled Marrickville council allowed a comfortable family villa down the road to be turned into a rat haven for thirty or more backpackers) and embarks on any "soft options" for refugees, Dr. No will come stomping about, complaining about how soft the government is, and how its behaviour will encourage the trade of people smuggling ...

Perhaps the most nauseating aspect of the whole affair is the way Morrison portrays himself as a concerned humanitarian, and takes offence at the notion that there's any kind of politics at play in the current hijinks.

LEIGH SALES: The reason you took this trip is because you see political mileage in going there and coming back and embarrassing the Gillard Government?

SCOTT MORRISON: I think that's offensive and I'm offended by the question. I went there to understand the realities.

LEIGH SALES: You didn't have an eye to the political mileage you would make out of it.

SCOTT MORRISON: I think it's cynical to think I'd have another approach. You know me well and you know I have a keen interest in these matters and a keen interest in understanding what the human dimension are of the decisions that we take as politicians.

Take offence? Why doesn't he take a gate while he's at it?

Does this explain why Morrison drummed up a meeting with Anwar Ibrahim, who naturally said that the human rights record of the Malaysian government has been atrocious (Cane is still on agenda for refugees)?

Was Morrison interested in the human dimensions of Anwar Ibrahim's current plight, involving a sex tape, and a police report, which has seen the politician allegedly move from homosexuality to a sex romp with a woman? ('Book Anwar if statement is false').

By golly, they play their politics rough and dirty in Malaysia, and there's Morrison stomping around like an elephant in the lotus pond. (Not that the Murdoch press can take any high ground, what with their contribution to the Pauline Hanson nude photograph saga).

As always, you can 'rely' on the Straits Times for more details in Anwar urged to quit after sex video 'confirmed'.

Meanwhile, what's Morrison learned after his trip? How has it changed him?

"We've stated our position on the Nauru option and this trip has only reaffirmed that position," Mr Morrison said.

Yep, it's all utterly predictable, with an utterly predictable result, with human misery and poverty as the backdrop to a stunt and a scare campaign, and the only seeming option in dealing with refugee issues amongst the major parties being either the 'tough' Malaysian solution or the 'soft' guano island solution, which happens to be 'tough' but not too 'tough', but perhaps 'tough enough' measured on the scale of toughness set out in the Dummies guide to political toughness.

Now all we need is an explanation of how this soft, caring 'solution' will provide the hard, stiff medicine the people smugglers and their desperate customers need ... and the yowling pack of stiff-necked Paul Sheehans lurking in the background expect of Dr. No and his team.

Still, there can be some comedy moments in politics, and the sight of Morrison explaining how white means black, or vice versa, in the context of Tony Abbott's selling down the river of Peter Reith was comedy gold which redeemed something of the tawdriness of the previous 'refugee' proceedings.

SCOTT MORRISON: ... We have a robust party and an open party process and I think the real challenges and things going on in this area are in the Labor Party. They're the part party of the long knives.

LEIGH SALES: Let's stick with your party for now. When a long time senior Liberal like Peter Reith is publicly humiliated surely that raises some questions about Tony Abbott's judgment and people skills?

SCOTT MORRISON: There was a ballot and two good candidates and one won. That's what happens.

Yep, and one man showed his vote to another. That's what happens when you want to slip the knife in deep and clean and hard after a read of the book of toughness.

That's more like it.

Oh it's good to be back in the lucky country, which seen from afar often seems to be the land of well-off whiners and whingers, as the political class go about their daily business of humbuggery and hypocrisy.

Meanwhile, pity the poor refugees who throw themselves on the tender mercies of these humbugger hypocrites.

A regional approach to refugees wherein Australia plays a humanitarian role with political decency?

Tell 'em they're dreaming ...

Better still, here mate, have a few coins ...

By golly, that made me feel better.

(Below: now here's a lotus flower and a nice set of wheels, and sssh, let's not turn the camera to the other side of the street).