Just as cricket has its Big Bashes, Australian politics has its Big Banalities.

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And the latter don't come much bigger and much more banal than Opposition Leader Sussan Ley's accusation that she hasn't seen Labor minister Penny Wong "shed a single tear" over the Bondi massacre.

Not only banal but spiteful and silly too, Ms Ley's calculated mock outburst was riddled with stupidities.

People who cry over things do most of their crying in private, where Ms Ley can never see them, can never know what they are feeling.

Average Australians, hearing Ms Ley's accusation of Penny Wong's heartlessness, are saying to themselves "Sussan Ley has never seen me shed a tear either but I deeply resent her accusing that means I am cold and unfeeling".

"For all she knows," the average Australian continues, indignantly, "I may cry rivers, albeit mostly at home, alone, indoors, instead of doing my crying theatrically, for audiences."

"Hell will freeze before I vote for a Liberal Party led by someone as insensitive and unpleasant as her, before I forgive all her shameless politicisings of the Bondi tragedy."

Thank you for that input, forthright average Australians.

Then, too, tearfulness, public or private, is not necessarily a good measure of human sensitivities. Tears can come cheap. Shakespeare points this out again and again and Wordsworth says it profoundly in his Intimations of Immortality.

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Sussan Ley hasn't seen me, either, shed a tear over the Bondi horror. I haven't shed any because the Bondi massacre has for some of us been so shocking that it is provoking thoughts that lie too deep for tears.

I quite often cry over things but........

© Canberra Times