Keeping government honest is up to all of us

While there is understandable attention on the region and the capacity of terrorism to influence events, the doubter and the aloof among us, will hear the dissentient voices within our own country.

They will hear the asylum seekers locked in inhumane conditions on the stony ground out of Port Augusta. They will hear those who speak out against the government’s attempts at blackmailing legislators who doubt the wisdom of draconian anti-terrorist legislation being passed into law, because they know that once we head down the road of intolerance and repression, the terrorists have won.

They will hear the voices of those who are fined exorbitant sums of money by Centrelink for being five minutes late for an interview, under the judgemental mutual-obligation welfare policies that are now the favourite tool for government to further divide our social cohesion by creating the deserving versus the non-deserving poor.

They will listen to the thousands of decent Muslims who live in our community, who share our values, and who as appalled at the acts of terror committed in the name of that religion as we are – and they will understand that the slaughter of millions, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and the removal of young Indigenous people from their families was all done in the name of another religion, Christianity.

They will question the relevance of symbols in 21^st century Australia such as a Queen as Head of State or a flag that reflects only 200 years of a nation’s history.

They will see headlines like ‘Courts soft on rapists’ and question whether the ritual of an election-time law and order auction by political parties and the tabloid media serves any purpose whatsoever in dealing with the societal structures and conditions that lead to the commission of crime.

And I could go on.

The point is that we have an obligation at times like the present, to refuse to succumb to the majority simply for the sake of surrendering to what Emile Zola called, "this sombre obstinacy of public opinion".

When we are confronted by others who tell us that 'now is not the time' to raise an issue, or that all you are doing is being divisive, then we should reach again to into Hitchens’ marvellous Letters to a Young Contrarian. He rightly urges a "long and risky life" where "only an open conflict of ideas and principles can produce any clarity". Conflict may be painful, but the painless solution does not exist and the pursuit of it leads to the painful outcome of mindlessness and pointlessness.