‘Crack down on welfare rorters. Get tough on radical Islam.’ If there’s a whiteboard in the Prime Minister’s office (or his much-maligned Chief of Staff’s), and those words or some version of them aren’t scribbled in caps with a bevy of arrows pointing to them, they should be. Cynics see the loud blasting of the twin barrels of national security and welfare reform as a sign of desperation – a frantic move by a panicked prime minister to stave off an inevitable Turnbull challenge. They are wrong.

The tough talk is long overdue and is the bedrock of why the Coalition so comprehensively defeated Labor at the last election. The proposed measures – incuding troop deployment – are the logical extension of what this government was elected to do: make the country safer and fix the budget.

Firstly, national security. Yes, saving people from drowning off our shores was always one of the main reasons for ‘stopping the boats’. Not having to stick parents and children in hellhole detention centres was another. But rational Australians also want controlled borders because they recognize that the alternative is chaotic, costly and dangerous for all involved. No amount of political correctness can disguise the fact many Australians have increasingly become suspicious, even fearful, of Islam, and open borders merely added to that insecurity.

But the real threat posed by the growing spread of Islamist ideology comes from within communities already living (and/or born) here. With due respect, the mainstream Muslim community is not doing all it can to disrupt homegrown radicalisation. We attempt to tackle domestic violence, sexual abuse, alcoholism, drug use and the myriad evils of modern society by ‘calling them out where we see them’ – by demanding those closest to the offenders speak out, by exposing the advocates, by dissecting the appeal, and by putting into place appropriate measures to dissuade people from being drawn to them. We do not tackle such threats by refusing to acknowledge our or others role in their existence. The veil of mystery that surrounds so-called hate preachers, the dissembling language of Hizb ut Tahrir and other apologists for terror, anti-Semitic texts in bookshops etc all need to be exposed and denounced. The full values of our democracy and the rule of secular over religious law need to be reinforced by Muslim community leaders and parents. The disingenuous language of ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘oppression’ must be replaced with a constructive dialogue of integration and inclusion.

Secondly, welfare reform. Doubtless, if many of our handouts were restricted to those for whom they were originally intended – the genuinely needy – our budget’s structural problems would start to disappear. Moves to encourage workforce participation will benefit individuals and the nation: ‘The best form of welfare is a job.’

Let’s hope the tough talk is matched with equally robust measures.

Human rights

Like many a compassionate and caring Australian, we were understandably outraged to the point of incandescent fury by one of the most grotesque and flagrant abuses of an innocent individual’s natural human rights that this country has ever witnessed.

We refer of course to the appalling case of the Flagrant Abuse of the Human Rights of the Egregiously Abused Grand Poobah of the Human Rights Commission.

In a fit of unprecedented pique, we offer to willingly reach out to Bill Shorten, Labor, the Greens, the twitterverse, Get Up! and any other similarly outraged organisations or individuals to wholeheartedly condemn this compassionateless and heartless trampling of an immensely talented and gifted individual’s pre-ordained natural rights.

We refer of course to the right to choose to hold an inquiry whenever it most suits your political purposes, the right to ignore or brush aside potential human rights abuses if they are inconveniently timed to fit your agreed agenda, the right to offer obscene sums of money as compensation to incarcerated individuals no matter what particularly violent or bloody murderous crimes they may have committed, the right to take extreme offence at anybody who dares to suggest you are not quite up to performing your job in anything remotely approaching a satisfactory or impartial manner, and the right to seek alternative employment with an unblemished reputation anywhere you so desire so long as it is on the lucrative human rights gravy train.