Sorry, but anyone who seriously thinks Liberal MP Trish Worth deserves the bollocking she's getting on refugees for her passing 'cats & dogs' comment just hasn't been paying attention.

Trish Worth-Voting-For is in fact one of the few Howard government medium-l 'damps' with a fine public track record on refugees, and she's earned it the hard way by going against the prevailing grain both inside her party room and in most of her local mainstream press (= 1 crappy Murdoch tabloid, basically). Toughish gig for a bleeding-heart.

Oh yeah - she's also quietly achieved a lot of good for specific asylum seeker families, even in cases where higher-profile activists have failed to make progress.

OK, so NHJ! electioneering hardheads might get annoyed at my wussy eschewal of anyone-but-JH tactics, but IMHO Worth thoroughly deserves to retain her marginal seat of Adelaide and I personally hope very much that she does. As for her crummy analogy, well, those of us who have spent much of the last three years on the receiving end of relentless 'anti-American', 'pro-terrorist', 'Saddam appeaser' and 'self-blamer' slanders for trying to express nuanced arguments dissenting from the simplistic 'war on terror' line ought to understand better than anyone the self-defeating sterility of any public conversation in which one or the other side (or both) remain loaded and cocked in a permanent state of verbal battle-readiness, poised to leap onto the tiniest linguistic hiccup opposite.

That's a huge part of MK's NHJ! message, surely: that it's time all people of good faith currently bellowing at each other across the Cultural War divides started to extend each other a little intellectual generosity and room-to-manoeuvre again.

On refugees, Trish Worth is of very good faith, and well worth listening to. I mean no offence, but the crowd who shouted her down in SA did not in my view do refugees any great favours. It's one thing to repeatedly, dishonestly and knowingly dehumanise Human Beings as having pitched their kids overboard as part of a vile campaign of moral 'blackmail' ; it's entirely another to reach off-the-cuff-and-on-the-stump for the nearest explicatory analogy, and alas grab one of the least poetic ones on offer.