It was big news. In Australia, it was the biggest news story of the year.

Nothing wrong with that - a 16 hour stand-off in a central Sydney café, a crazed gunman and - tragically - the death of two entirely innocent victims; of course it should be big news.

Sieges however, are not unknown in Australia. Only last month, another nutjob held two people hostage in a Melbourne suburban house with a similarly awful and appalling outcome.

Bad news is always - rightly - a big news story but the Melbourne siege wasn't as big and wasn't as internationally reported as the one in the Lindt Café.

Why so?

Well, for starters, the bampot in question was of Middle Eastern descent. There was a flag with an Arabian quotation. There was, or so it was assumed at the time, a terrorist connotation.

Well before the gunman's demands were known, the media, the politicians and the public were labelling it the work of ISIS. Or the Taliban. Or Al Qaeda. It had to be.

Uniquely, Australia has - thankfully - never truly been the venue for a malevolent act of organised political extremism. Everyone in the country however, believes it is only a matter of time. Surely, the thinking goes, it must be us next.

There are significant racial tensions in Australia and, in fact, there always have been.

Leaving aside the appalling history of indigenous subjugation, every bit as invidious as the South African system of apartheid - up until 1967 Aboriginal people had an official status lower than that of native flora and fauna - racial discrimination is alive and well today.

Indigenous people continue to lag well behind in terms of life expectancy, education opportunity, health and general poverty - a national scandal that has basically never been addressed - and in addition, other forms of racism freely abound.

A lot of it is casual racism. Not that that makes it even vaguely acceptable.

Anyone of a Greek, Italian, Slavic or even Eastern European background is habitually called a w*g, an offensive term that doesn't lose any of its resonance by its ubiquity.

People from India, Pakistan, Africa, The Middle East or anywhere else in the world (the obvious exception being the British Isles and USA), well, I'll let you draw your own conclusions. Suffice to say they're not terms you want to hear or see in a mainstream publication.

Sticks and stones and all that? I think we're all agreed that's cobblers. Names will always hurt you.

As the Sydney siege developed, there was a significant - not a majority response but significant - racial backlash. People gathered at the site - halfwits to a man and woman - taking selfies, drinking beer and brutally disparaging Islam and Muslims in general and immigration and refugees in particular.

This kneejerk was stimulated and actively encouraged by certain sections of the media which reported - I know this is true because I heard it - that 'an organisation thought to be connected to the Brotherhood are responsible'.

I'm not sure who 'The Brotherhood' are. But I'm pretty certain they didn't mean The Masons.

As it turned out, the gunman responsible was connected to no known or unknown terrorist organisation. He wasn't even connected to his own brain.

He was, to put it bluntly - a nutter. A man with a history of mental illness, criminal activity and self-delusion. A crazy lone wolf.

The Sydney siege wasn't an act of terrorism. It was an act of criminality from a man with no discernible political agenda.

His agenda was entirely personal. Nutty, but personal.

Not that that makes how widely it was reported any less acceptable. It's still a tragedy and consequently still highly newsworthy.

But, logically speaking how is it any more (or less) tragic or newsworthy than the Melbourne siege which dropped off the pages of the newspapers two days after its horrific deadly conclusion?

Is it simply because this particular diddy was an Arab?

And an immigrant? And a refugee?

It's a matter of opinion.

But I know what mine is.