Some thoughts for the new management

And, third, courage, especially the courage to stand by what you believe to be ethical and rejecting that which you believe to be unethical, when doing so involves a cost to yourself, such as risking your future in politics.

In conclusion, no one has a good sense of where the world is going and the past does not predict the future. Witold Rybczynski's book Home: A short history of an idea, which documents how the availability of electricity caused a revolution in people's domestic lives, powerfully demonstrates the truth of that. Almost certainly, the Internet will be regarded in the future as having done the same with respect to how humans communicate.

But, while recognizing the revolutionary potential of scientific discoveries and the increase in knowledge they bring, we still need to use human memory (John Ralston Saul's evocative term for history) and imagination (our capacity to contemplate the future) as important ethical warning mechanisms.

And we ignore our feelings at our ethical peril. Science is now backing up what we've always known in these regards, but have denigrated in recent times, namely, that moral intuition and examined emotions are important human ways of knowing, especially about ethics. We are not just logical, cognitive beings, essential as the human capacity to reason is; rather good ethical judgment requires that we use all our human ways of knowing and we, including politicians, should not be frightened of doing so.

So, I wish Australia's "new management team" bonne chance and bon courage in creating an ethical future for all Australians and Australia.