During the brief storm caused by Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Scott Morrison's remarks on the recent asylum seeker funerals, another senior Liberal praised his compassion, claiming he was deeply affected by the sufferings people smugglers had caused asylum seekers.
I am delighted to accept this testimony to Morrison's compassion for asylum seekers. But, even if this compassion is sincere, the implicit argument that asylum seekers merit sympathy because they are the passive victims of people smugglers is pernicious.
It is usually put in this form. Credulous asylum seekers are lured by avaricious people smugglers to travel on unsafe boats to Australian territory. Fellow-feeling with asylum seekers demands that this risk to life and health must therefore be stopped by preventing and penalising travel by boat.
This argument assumes that death at sea in an unsafe boat is the greatest peril that asylum seekers have to fear, that they are the passive and deluded victims of people smugglers, and that their lives will benefit if people smugglers are neutered. None of these assumptions is true.
Asylum seekers walk with death as their shadow. Persecution in your homeland and surrounding nations means living among people who will rejoice in your death, others who will not lift a finger to keep you or your family alive, and a society in which your humanity is valued less than animals.
If you pray with a group of asylum seekers, they will ask you to remember their dead relatives and friends and those who risk death along the way.
The story of asylum seekers has always been of fortunate and determined survivors and the unknown dead. Many Jews died trying to leave Germany. Some estimate that more than a third of the hundreds of thousands who fled from Vietnam after 1975 were killed by pirates or sank while at sea. Many Cambodians died in minefields or where shot by paramilitary when escaping into Thailand.
Villagers from El Salvador, harried by their armed forces and hunted out of their homes, died at the guns trained on them from both sides of the Rio Lempa. And yet they all continued to flee.
Asylum seekers have also always needed help to make their journey to safety. Even Joseph and Mary are often depicted with a young guide as they flee into Egypt. Many Jewish asylum seekers were given shelter and helped to cross borders by ordinary families and by religious communities.
Our people smugglers may be seen as distinctive in that they charge high prices for their troubles. But asylum seekers have always relied on people who exploited them. Chances are that even the legendary donkey on which Mary and Jesus rode to Egypt was hired at an extortionate rate.
Certainly, asylum seekers from behind the Iron Curtain, Cambodians fleeing into Thailand, Afghans escaping the Taliban and Vietnamese fleeing from Vietnam all needed help to escape. They often feared their helpers, but had no other options. They were prepared to pay over the odds for the opportunity to save their lives and retain their dignity as human beings.
In Australia most on-shore asylum seekers have been found to be refugees. This is testimony that they had the courage and inner resource to escape persecution in their own countries, to risk their lives and those of their families by setting out on a long journey, including on an overcrowded boat, in order to find protection. For them people smugglers are minor attendants in death's court.
If we are to sympathise with asylum seekers we owe it to them to listen to their story, to be moved to anger at the conditions that forced them from their own country, to admire their courage and freedom of spirit, to grieve for those who died at each point of the journey, and to ensure that those who need protection are offered it without need of people smugglers.
Measures like pushing boats away, keeping people in detention and dumping them on Nauru don't flow naturally from sympathy for asylum seekers. They are the natural expressions of fear and antipathy. Of course, like the legendary headmaster who caned boys savagely while feeling more hurt than they were, it is possible in good conscience to feel sympathy and to support barbarous deeds. But in the case of asylum seekers, this attitude is condescending. It pretends that we can know their predicament better than they know it themselves, and that we can address the ills they suffer by further unmerited assault on their dignity.
In a fallen world and so, mercifully, not in Australia, it is also conceivable that people might feign sympathy for the suffering of asylum seekers at the hands of people smugglers in order to win support for their proposal to prevent asylum seekers from coming to Australia by boat, come what may. In that case the expression of sympathy would be canting humbug, a grimace to mask the brutality of one's attitudes and actions.
Either way, neither asylum seekers nor the rest of us should have to put up with this nonsense.
Andrew Hamilton is the consulting editor of Eureka Street.