The compassion auction under way over refugees is sickening. Australians are fed up to the back teeth with pompous preening gits parading their manufactured compassion and denigrating this country as mean and heartless.
Australia is the most generous country on earth when it comes to giving refugees a new home. Soon we will be giving new homes to 18,750 refugees a year under our increased -humanitarian intake.
Per capita we are second to none, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency. Our rate of refugee resettlement in 2014 was 0.491 per 1000 population, compared with Canada at 0.346, Norway at 0.253, the US 0.227, Sweden 0.205 and New Zealand 0.164. 
On raw figures we are in the top three with the US and -Canada. Between the three of us we provide 80 per cent of the UNHCR's refugee resettlement.
All this generosity was made possible because the Abbott government stopped the boats. That allowed us to open up more than 4000 humanitarian places since 2013-14 specifically for Syrian refugees, when under Labor just 98 Syrian refugees were resettled in 2012-13 and just nine in 2011-12.
We are the world champions in compassion, backed up by deeds, not words. The United Nations has recognised Australia as the best resettlement services provider in the world.
And yet this truth is impossible for our chattering classes to accept. That can only be because their entire identity and reputation relies on denigrating Australia. Their hearts soar when The New York Times attacks us.
Witness Geoffrey Robertson, who was this week at chattering class HQ, the ABC's Q&A program. His primary concern is Australia's reputation as a pariah in the eyes of an ailing American broadsheet.
"If Australia doesn't step up, we get another editorial in The New York Times saying that Australians are a mean and miserable race, and we've got to answer this. It was terribly damaging," he declared.
Robertson and the rest of the bleeding heart brigade cling desperately to their myth of a mean-spirited xenophobic, parochial redneck Australia, rather than one of the most generous and successful multicultural nations on earth.
"Politicians in Australia saying we're the most generous per capita which is complete and utter rubbish. We aren't," the president of the Refugee Council of Australia Phil Glendenning told ABC radio yesterday.
"Yes, you've got to manipulate the figures in a particular way to get to that conclusion," said his host Linda Mottram.
No, you don't.
The only person manipulating the figures is human rights lawyer Julian Burnside, who has built a reputation on maligning this country.
He issued a statement this week claiming "Australia is not the most generous country when it comes to resettling refugees".
But he is comparing apples with oranges, comparing the 1.5 million asylum seekers and refugees passing through Turkey, for instance, with Australia's refugee intake.
He has confused refugee resettlement, a generous voluntary humanitarian act, with refugee hosting, in which a country tolerates refugees flooding over the border from a war zone. Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon provide very little to Syrian refugees other than temporary haven, a few tents or, in the case of Turkey, old workers' accommodation and prefab buildings at a dam site next to the Euphrates.
This is what Philip Ruddock saw last   November when he visited those camps. In Lebanon, where more than a million refugees have arrived, he saw people sleeping in tents on the street or on farms.
That's not a life. "The expectation is that these people will be going home soon," says Ruddock, a prospect that seems increasingly unlikely.
Ruddock says Syria's civil war is a "humanitarian disaster of an order we've never seen before. There are no countries that can accommodate this humanitarian crisis through refugee resettlement. Countries have to focus on how we find a political solution." Burnside even says Germany is more generous than Australia, although it resettled just 280 refugees in 2014 and ranked 17th in the world.
But now these "grandchildren of the Gestapo", as Robertson so charmingly calls them, have vowed to process 800,000 asylum seeker claims, thus prompting the chaos across Europe. But Germany hasn't worked out much of a plan after that.
What chutzpah Bill Shorten has now to demand Australia bring in an extra 10,000 refugees from Syria. The cost conservatively, according to figures from the time of Immigration Minister Scott Morrison, would be $800 million to $1 billion.
We can and should, of course, do more, but the refugees we should help from Syria are the Christians who are being religiously cleansed from the Middle East. They have nowhere else to go.
Christians and other persecuted minorities can't even stay in the refugee camps because they are persecuted there.
Whatever we do, we need to tread carefully, or else we run the risk of repeating the disastrous mistake of the Lebanese concession of 1975-76 when, in a fit of compassion, the Fraser government lost control of its program and allowed in more than 10,000 economic migrants who rorted the system.
Illiterate Lebanese Muslims from impoverished rural areas, they arrived in Australia at a time of high unemployment and settled in southwest Sydney, where their trouble integrating had ramifications which are still being felt.This is what happens when you allow moral vanity to guide decision making.