If you were watching the news on television, reading the papers and listening to the radio last week then perhaps you've ended up asking yourself a question that so many people have been pondering.

Many people? I'm talking about mainstream Liberal and Labor supporters, and the odd middle-of-the-road punter who has flirted with the Greens because they have (correctly) perceived a desperate paucity of soul in mainstream politics. I'm also talking about Liberal politicians and Labor politicians, and the people who work for them.

And right now they are saying the same thing: Australian politics has not only lost its soul - but also its heart.

Last week the level of political debate (no, more than that - it was actually our nation's moral thermometer) flat-lined below zero. The issue was ostensibly the financial cost of sending mainly Muslim asylum seekers from detention on the other side of the country to Sydney for the funerals of their loved ones who died when their boat disintegrated on the rocks at Christmas Island in a storm last December.

Australians see themselves largely as an egalitarian, honest, friendly, laid-back and tolerant bunch. But politicians know a vein of ugly sentiment and emotion - not least xenophobia and its kindred resentments, and an irrational fear of the "other" brought about by our geographic isolation - runs close to the surface.

Despair for our lost soul

The controversial Liberal senator Cory Bernardi has been labelled Opposition Leader Tony Abbott's ''attack dog'' by a senior colleague as internal tensions over the Coalition's stance on immigration threaten to boil over in Canberra.

After a turbulent two weeks for the opposition in which senior leadership tensions, factional infighting, shadow cabinet leaks and an ideological split on immigration policy have dominated the headlines, MPs and senators will come face to face at a party room meeting on Tuesday.

Mr Abbott has distanced himself from remarks made on radio by Senator Bernardi, who is his parliamentary secretary, that censured Islam as a ''totalitarian, political and religious ideology''.

But a senior Liberal MP told The Sun-Herald that the comments were ''a disgraceful and low way of reigniting the race debate''.

''This is a man who acts regularly as Abbott's attack dog, and he clearly needs to be kept on a short leash instead of being sent out into the community as a harbinger of fear,'' the source said.

Tony Abbott's 'attack dog' Cory Bernardi under fire

Scientists used to think that chimpanzees - our close relatives - were a gentle, peace-loving species, until they observed their behaviour in the wild and found they could be quite murderous towards other chimps. What caused them to become vicious was the arrival in their territory of chimps from a different troop.

I remembered this one day after failing to persuade a friend, who took a dim view of asylum seekers, that her objections were unfounded. Whenever I knocked down one argument she'd just switch to another.

Our evolutionary history has left us with an instinctive fear of outsiders - people who are different, people who invade our territory to steal our food and our women or, in the contemporary context, to jump the queue and steal our jobs, overcrowd our schools (and win most of the prizes), overwhelm our culture, push up house prices and add to congestion on the roads.

You can call it racism or religious intolerance - the nation that invented the White Australia policy can hardly object to that charge, except to say we're no worse than most nationalities and better than some. But I think it's best thought of as xenophobia - a fear of foreigners, people who are different, who aren't one of us.

And it's so deeply ingrained, so visceral, that it's not susceptible to rational argument. It would be nice if a greater effort by the media to expose the many myths surrounding attitudes towards asylum seekers could dispel the fear and resentment, but it would make little difference.

A crack in the wall of xenophobia

The shadow attorney-general, George Brandis, has joined the condemnation of those preaching division against Muslims, saying politicians of all persuasions, conservatives included, had a duty to resist intemperate voices.

Senator Brandis, a leading Liberal moderate, described those targeting Muslims as akin to the bullies he witnessed beating up Italian children when he was at school in the 1960s.

''It was from that experience that I formed my lifelong detestation of bullies who pick on a vulnerable minority just because they are different,'' he said.

Senator Brandis's comments, made in a pointed article - Politicians Must Defend The Multicultural Project - written for today's Herald, came as the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, was forced to spell out at yesterday's joint party room meeting that the Coalition's immigration policy was non-discriminatory and the party's support for multiculturalism still stood.

''We will never say to perfectly good Australians that they are not fully valued in their own country,'' he said.

Senior Liberal condemns anti-Muslim 'bullies'

Independent member of Parliament Andrew Wilkie has called on Opposition Leader Tony Abbott to sack his shadow immigration minister Scott Morrison and his parliamentary secretary Senator Cory Bernardi, accusing the MPs of peddling racial hatred.

In a speech to Parliament this afternoon, Mr Wilkie said the two MPs were "a disgrace to the high office you hold and the people you represent".

He was referring to Mr Morrison's questioning of the cost of flying mourning relatives to the funerals of asylum seekers who died in last year's shipwreck on Christmas Island and Senator Bernardi's "rants whipping up fear of Islam".

Mr Abbott forced Senator Bernardi to retract a statement made in a recent interview that Islam was a problem.

Mr Morrison conceded he might have gone too far in suggesting taxpayers should not have paid for the funerals.

But Mr Wilkie said Mr Abbott had not done enough to stamp out the "racism that eats at the Liberal Party".

"I say to Mr Abbott, you must lance this boil once and for all. It is not good enough to dismiss the hate inhabiting the dark corners of the Liberal Party ... by just noting that your most senior operatives merely go a little too far," Mr Wilkie said.

"What you should have done is sack such people immediately from the shadow ministry and read the whole lot the riot act."

"You must also look afresh at your party's policies, determined to address the way hate corrupts your party's approach to public policy," he said.

Wilkie tells Abbott to sack senior Libs for peddling racial hatred