Beware the supermarket shopping asylum seekers

Over the weekend Brisbane’s Sunday Mail dispatched its snapper to Toombul shopping centre north of the city to pap its front-page target. But this wasn’t a celebrity. It wasn’t a crook on the run. This was a mother and her two daughters — “suspected immigration detainees” as the paper captioned them.

We don’t know their names, but thanks to the paper’s sleuths we do know what they purchased while “enjoying” their tour through Coles — “home brand Hawaiian pizza, Smith’s potato crisps and cartons of Coca-Cola.”

The Sunday Mail splashed the supermarket scoop across their front page — headlined “THEY’RE HERE” (surely not a nod to Poltergeist?) — in a story that ran prominently in all of Rupert’s rags yesterday.

And if you somehow missed the implication, Piers Akerman filled in the blanks in the Daily Telegraph this morning: this “happy Afghan women” (Piers has the inside word on her mental state and nationality) and her fellow “fast-tracked” asylum seekers with their “overflowing shopping trolleys, courtesy of the Australian taxpayer” send a “strong message” that Australia’s doors are open.

How can we hope to have a reasoned debate about asylum seekers, and the oft mentioned push and pull factors, with press coverage like this?

They’re here, all right. No, not “these people” (as Piers likes to refer to them.) We mean tabloid fear-mongers like the newly-installed Sunday Mail editor Scott Thompson — setting any kind of reasoned debate about asylum seekers wildly off course for another ugly political debate in an election year.