OUR APPROACH to asylum seekers is woefully inadequate. I don’t necessarily mean the government’s asylum seeker policies, although those policies are certainly fraught with all sorts of problems. What I mean is how we, as a society, approach the issue of asylum seekers.

That approach is reflected in the public discourse on asylum seekers – or rather, the discourse on how to respond to their arrival. That discourse manifests itself not so much in what individual Australians think or say, as in the comparatively small number of positions that feature most prominently in public debate…