Last night I witnessed an extraordinary speech by young British writer Kate Tempest. I have seen few speakers more sincere. Her words burned with the white-hot shine of anger. At one point she spoke of how glad she had been to be able to visit Australia several times. But she had something she had to say to us. She had observed, she said, “a damaging and dangerous racism at root in this country”.

This morning I woke up to the news that the man whose responsibility it is to manage immigration in this country had said, of “many” refugees:

They won’t be numerate or literate in their own language, let alone English. These people would be taking Australian jobs, there’s no question about that. For many of them that would be unemployed, they would languish in unemployment queues and on Medicare and the rest of it so there would be huge cost and there’s no sense in sugar-coating that, that's the scenario.

Putting aside the terrible threat posed by refugees who will both take Australian jobs and languish in unemployment queues (“Why, sometimes,” said the Queen, “I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!”), it would be foolish to say that there is no truth to Dutton’s claims. Of course literacy and numeracy are challenges for some refugees, and of course there are costs associated with resettlement.

But anyone with any experience of politics knows that one of the most important choices made in a campaign each day is not simply what soundbite to use, or which policy to roll out, but which topic you want the focus to land on.

Don’t take my word for it: take the word of all those Liberal strategists who have been briefing newspapers in recent weeks, happy to be quoted on background saying that any day the country is talking about asylum seekers is a good day for the government.

I doubt Mark Textor was one of them, but Textor, the Liberal Party’s go-to pollster, wrote a very good article coincidentally published this morning on how one should analyse a campaign. He made the point that a party can win the political battle not by winning the argument that day, but by pushing an issue on which it has an advantage to the heart of the debate:

Imagine a right-of-centre party gains vote: it might find the movement came from men, over 35 years, mostly due to a statistically significant shift up in the voting salience of economic issues on the Y-axis, not any positive shift on who is the ‘best party’ on that issue on the X-axis (where they may have a traditionally strong lead).

So while it’s possible to have a discussion about whether Dutton’s comments are true, that would be skipping the question the government would like you to skip, which is why we’re having this discussion in the first place.

Dutton’s comments were inflammatory. It is possible that he was not instructed to say those exact words, but it’s plausible that he was given a broader “hunting license” by campaign headquarters, and told to go as hard as he could, gloves all the way off.

In either case his decision – or that of the campaign – was depressingly cynical. If it was not calculated then it is perhaps more disquieting: these are the thoughts at the top of the mind of the man whose job it is to think about immigration all the time.

Whatever the scenario, Malcolm Turnbull’s response was as damp as it could be. Turnbull did very little to suggest Dutton had done anything wrong. Quite the opposite. Dutton was an “outstanding immigration minister”.

Trying not to depart too far from the reputation he once had, the PM did say “Many of them are illiterate in their own language. Many haven’t completed high school. That is no fault of theirs. That is why we are reaching out to help them with compassion.” But how compassionate is Dutton’s accusation that “these people would be taking Australian jobs, there’s no question about that”?

Is this a process story? Yes. But process stories matter sometimes, because they unveil the motivations of the men and women behind them. Politics is not just a clever game played by clever people. It affects human beings. This debate is about human beings. Refugees in our community would have felt personally demoralised by Dutton’s comments last night, and by the prime minister’s refusal to distance himself today. Some of them will suffer from the social division that inevitably results, either now or in the long run, from demonisation. So when the men and women playing their clever games choose to hurt one group of people in the interests of winning the votes of another group of people then that process story is worth our time. And our condemnation.

Underneath all this lie far more worrying questions, like why the Coalition believes Australians will respond positively to Dutton’s claims, and why the rabid fear of asylum seekers continues to haunt this nation. My point about Kate Tempest, by the way, is not that we should care what a British playwright thinks about us. My point is that days like today suggest she may be right.

Today’s links