Ah, Scott Morrison.

Has no-one explained to the shadow minister for immigration the ground-rules for the use of a dog whistle?

Those who toot upon this fabled instrument do so with a complex purpose in mind; to reach certain receptive ears, while maintaining plausible deniability of a darker motive.

This nuance appears to have escaped the enthusiastic Mr Morrison, who is reported this morning to have enjoined his shadow ministerial colleagues, in a meeting last December, to use community concerns about Muslim immigration for the Coalition's political advantage.

Leave aside, for a moment, the approximately one million things that are wrong with the proposition itself (can you imagine a shadow minister proposing that his party capitalising on community suspicions of Jews, or Chinese taxi drivers?).

Mr Morrison, it seems, is a new breed: the Audible Whistler.

The Roger Whittaker of his political generation.

This may explain Mr Morrison's antics earlier in the week, when he robustly questioned why families of the Christmas Island boat crash victims were flown at public expense to the Sydney funerals.

(That lucky, lucky little orphan.)

Coalition MPs regularly complain that journalists are concentrating too much on the Opposition, and not enough on the Government.

This is not a complaint, by the way, that was heard very frequently 10 years ago, when the Coalition, in government, revelled every day in the front-page stories documenting Labor's sustained, party-wide wig-out on the very same subject matter.

But how could anyone ignore the nasty dot-to-dot that is increasingly created by Mr Morrison's public and private remarks?

Or the irresistible conclusion that the conflation of three disparate groups - boat people who happen to be Muslims, groups of Islamic extremists, and the 350,000-plus Muslims living in Australia today - is not an accidental one?

With Mr Morrison's dance tune now clearly audible, the actions of other Liberal MPs now take on a horribly choreographed feel.

This report, in which former immigration minister Kevin Andrews and Tony Abbott's parliamentary secretary Cory Bernardi warn Australia of the dangers of halal meat, is a case in point.

"I, for one, don't want to eat meat butchered in the name of an ideology that is mired in sixth century brutality and is anathema to my own values," says Senator Bernardi.

Senator Bernardi is by no means a stupid man, but one suspects he might be barking up the wrong one here.

This is Australia. We all eat food which has been prepared in methods we might - on reflection - not necessarily endorse.

How else could the continuing popularity of the meat pie be explained?

If Senator Bernardi and Kevin Andrews are really spending their days haunted by the nightmarish possibility that they might, at some seemingly-innocuous community function, inadvertently consume a vol-au-vent containing beef from a cow which has been slaughtered by knife instead of stun-gun, several questions spring immediately to mind.

One of them is: "Are you busy enough at work?"

The point is that Mr Morrison, in belling this cat, has done more than make himself the story.

He has made his colleagues the story, too - and it's not an attractive one.

Annabel Crabb is ABC Online's chief political writer.