Readers Write: You tell us your views and your comments

---

Tom also tells Irene Khan (Is Australia reneging on its tradition of support for human rights?) to: “Get a life”.

---

Alex Whisson (WA) bemoans the absence of an appeal to the common good. He writes: “One of the striking features of the current election campaign is the absence of appeal to a concern for general welfare and community health, the common good. Associated with this is an absence of discussion of the rightness or fairness of government policies. Thus we have endless discussions of the relative venal inducements to vote for this or that party. The principle of access to education for all children, irrespective of the success, good fortune or hard times of their parents is muddied by the venal aspects of whether this or that social group will gain more from Liberal or Labor policy. Taxation, unemployment relief and health are discussed in a similar "what's in it for me" context.

"There are many people who would willingly pay a little more tax if they were confident that it would be spent to help the needy. The war against Iraq, now stated to be illegal by the UN and clearly resulting in immense suffering by the Iraqi people, has been evaluated in terms of whether it makes Australia safer or less safe, not whether it is evil or criminal. The question of the wrongness of invading a sovereign state and killing its people is evidently considered not worth discussing. Many conversations and comments by a wide range of people strongly suggest to me that Australians still do have a sense of fairness, decency and respect for truthfulness which is now totally ignored by politicians and by the media, but is no less real for that”.

---

Ian Sinclair (NSW) takes a slightly more cynical view: “...I participated in one of your phone forums the other evening and it struck me that the fact that you had people from different voting backgrounds but with similar Howard-opinions took all of us nowhere. My only conclusion was that many thinking people were critical of the morality of the government whereas I know (and declare in the most elitist way) that the majority cares only for their wallets. Furthermore democracy (as we know it) has sent us this problem as a proverbial cross to bear. Who is sufficiently altruistic to vote against your own interests? I cite a letter in the Sydney Morning Herald on Thursday September 16, 2004, where a person wrote that she supported the reduction of funding to the elite schools despite the fact that her son attended one. She wrote that she thought the society might be a better one if the public schools were better. That is the crux of the issue”.