Talk is cheap, tears are not enough, and being sorry will get you nowhere

Unfortunately, instead the international community will keep on pursuing symbolic initiatives with high costs and limited benefits like the Kyoto Protocol. Battling against apocalyptic scenarios of The Day After Tomorrow sound far more interesting than fixing sewage somewhere in Botswana or providing mosquito nets in Sri Lanka. Plus, in the good conspicuous compassion tradition, you can agitate for the Kyoto Protocol from the comfort of the armchair in your living room, without ever dirtying your hands with actual work.

Australian society, sadly, is not free of tokenism, symbolism and conspicuous compassion. There are sections of our society which hold a belief that a UN resolution will depose a tyrant or restore peace, that aid and debt forgiveness will transform the developing world, or that saying sorry will increase the life expectancy of Indigenous Australians and stop domestic violence. But the Howard Government has been consistently resistant to this sort of make-believe social, economic and foreign policy, which is why it has championed initiatives and philosophies such as mutual obligation, practical reconciliation, and tied aid.

There is always a scope for more. Our approach to tackling international and domestic problems should be simple: Think before you speak. Prefer actions to words. Spend wisely. If it hasn’t worked in the past it is not likely to work in the future. If it sounds like magic, it probably is.

My mother always used to say, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I would extend this principle even further - even if you have something nice to say, don’t say anything unless you’re also prepared to do something.