Why do Australians, normally a laid-back and tolerant, if not welcoming, people, suddenly turn in to foaming paranoiacs when a few leaky craft bearing the wretched of the earth appear off our shores? Certainly the program of propaganda and brainwashing run by the last government did not help: asylum seekers were transformed by a longstanding campaign into queue jumpers, disease carriers, drug runners, potential terrorists and eventually child murderers.