than the exporting of jobs offshore; more attention than the destruction of our manufacturing sector to the point where we don't really make anything here but lattes and hairdressing appointments; more attention than the disguised unemployment that sees just under two million people wanting to work full time now or in the next four weeks having either no work or too little; more attention than the more than two million Australians who live in a household where no-one has a job. These are among Australia's real problems. These problems really matter. Then there are the environmental problems that are just our own and the existential problem we share with the rest of the world -- climate change. But despite these very real and pressing problems Australia faces, we're more likely to wake up to the chant in the media: 'Stop the boats! Stop the boats!' And we keep hearing that because both major parties find these other problems so difficult they don't even acknowledge the existence of most of them. But they know that there are votes in the exploitation of the latent xenophobia in most of us. And so they compete with each other in their exclusion of the weak and persecuted with a different skin colour or different religion. A few mornings after I first saw the brown-skinned workman eating something in the cabin of his ute, I was pounding the streets when I saw him in his ute again. This time there was a child beside him,