As I write, our often hard-hearted nation is showing some tender-heartedness towards the Iranian soccer players who want to stay in Australia.

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Our prime minister, who has been displaying a heart of concrete towards the forlorn Australian "Isis brides" and their children, seems somehow, inconsistently, to be displaying some warm-hearted human decency in this matter.

"Australians have been moved by the plight of these brave women. They're safe here and they should feel at home here," he has gushed, artfully.

It is a blessing to come to Australia and to feel safe and welcome here and it is a special blessing when one has fled to this lucky, favoured country from somewhere God-forsaken.

If only, then, our national warm-heartedness in these things wasn't so selective. Australia's treatment of some other sorts of foreigners who hanker to come here (for example "boat people" foreigners lacking the obvious immediate appeal of elite, young, female athletes) is an enduring source of national shame.

"Australia has one of the harshest immigration detention regimes in the world," the Australian Human Rights Commission believes, detailing that harshness (which includes prolonged and sometimes offshore detention in God-forsaken places) online at About Immigration and detention in Australia.

There is a special irony in our being a "stop the boats" people with our cold, xenophobic "stop the boats" side cunningly exploited and pandered to by fear-mongering, xenophobia-mongering federal governments and oppositions.

Earlier this month on an edition of ABC Radio National's ever-stimulating Late Night Live (LNL), the dashingly cluey archaeologist Peter Veth scotched the old idea that the first people to arrive on this continent (certainly arriving at least 65,000 years ago and probably far, far longer ago than that) had come down to Australia from SE Asia on foot........

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