A culture damaged by fear
We have accepted the overthrow of vital legal protections and traditions that have been fundamental to our law and system of government for centuries.
Our culture is indeed sick. You could say we have a virus and cancer. The virus is the fear of terrorism. We are afraid of a threat yet to happen in our country, a threat our nation’s leading security experts don’t place in the top five facing us, and a threat that will never kill as many Australians as smoking or obesity.
We have misunderstood the magnitude of this threat. Terrorism lacks the resources to ever defeat the West directly. For sound economic reasons, the world is yet to see a prosperous Islamist nation based on anything but oil. We have been manipulated by those who benefit from us being afraid. Our overreaction to the terror threat has already done serious damage to our laws and institutions. The cancer is that we no longer care about what matters.
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I agree with Ross Buckley. Our society is beginning to lose it’s soul and in its place we seem to be placing the mighty dollar and any fear factor that will get parties elected.
I strongly endorse Professor Buckley’s commentary on the effects the crafting of a fear driven public perception by the Howard government over the last decade has had on a large swathe of Australians. We can interpret the relatively small public reaction to his catalogue of incursions impinging on our most basic rights as reflecting a manifest personal preoccupation with matters of sport and economy, as he points out, but also a seeming lack of political responsibility to engage in assuring the integrity of our purportedly free & fair systems of democratic governance.
On this note I want to inject a note of optimism however. Having participated in several projects over recent years with a focus on troubling issues of a global and international nature, and particularly with an educational focus to reach out to the wider public in Melbourne, it is clear there are many who are interested and concerned, but struggle to find wise and effective ways to act with perceptions of complexity.
This is a comment on the Ross Buckley article “A complacent nation”. I think many Australians do care, but are at a loss as to know what to do. We have never had a government as deliberately racist and deceptive before and many, I’m sure, just don’t know what to do. I wrote several letters to Howard, for example, but, of course, they made no difference to his policies.
Ross Buckley says that “we” have accepted all sorts of things that diminish our freedoms.
Well the “we” does not refer to me. I am just as concerned as he about the abuse og habeas corpus in David Hick’s case and all the other ills he cites.
I am hopeful, however, that Buckley generalises too much. I hope that some significant part of the disdain with which the Prime Minister and his Government are held by so many Australians, at least according to the opinion polls, reflects the criticisms Buckley makes.
Given all the Prime Minister’s sins against Australia’s democracy it would be a fitting end to his career if he lost his seat at the coming election. But the PM is so full of spin and lies I doubt he would be able to read that message.
Ross Buckley is right. I suspect we are seeing the rise of neo-conservatism.
When Harold Holt declared “All the way with LBJ”, he could not foresee that, 40 years on, another Liberal prime minister would be so in thrall to the American president that he would scuttle our core civil protections.
We Australians allowed this to happen, with minimal protest and strong public support – as evidenced by letters to the editor and talkback radio, from the Tampa incident to the transfer of Hicks from Guantanamo Bay.
While our minds are preoccupied with acquisition and debt, our civil rights are devalued because most of us have never needed the protection they gave us before this war on terror.
Seven years after Harold Holt, Australia realised it was time for change – time to recover national pride through independence from America.
As we approach a Federal election, does either side offer the policy basis for hope to recover ministerial responsibility, and to develop our own responses to militant Islam and global warming?
There is little doubt that Australia has a virulent virus of fear, as Professor Buckley asserts. It was spawned by the diseased minds of John Howard and his backers to get our citizens to acquiesce tamely to laws designed to remove freedoms and protections that took hundreds of years to win from governments. It is spread by moronic talk-back hosts, supine media and taxpayer funded blanket advertising.
Parallel to the virus is the cancer of public acceptance. We are not all affected, but few have sought a cure. Howard has been re-elected in spite of performing diabolical acts against the rule of law and justice, against refugees in inhuman ways, against Aboriginals in every way conceivable.
Fortunately, there is a cure for both viruses and it is in our hands. All we need to do is, first realize that power, and then use it at the ballot box to eradicate both of these horrific diseases. Then, see to it that succeeding governments clean up all contamination.
Our rights since september 11 2001 have slowly been eroded! Since then the invasion of Iraq has done nothing to resolve the threat, if anything this has intensified the hate of the west by extremists. The dollar rules our generation, and the attitude of our times has become that nothing will stand in the way of what we assume to be progress and the greter good of humanity! How wrong we are!
17September 2007
Living in Tasmania is a fantastic experience. However, we have within our state a severe lack of transparency & democracy as perpetuated on the citizens of this place. Terror comes in many guises and forms, and as a passionate global citizen who cares deeply about freedom & democracy our so -called electoral representatives & in particular Premier Lennon terrorism comes in the form of a democratic dictatorship. We fear this more than the bogey man terrorist.
Thank you.
Philip Crouch
-globalcitizen
Wny should we not denigrate a religion that orders its adherents to kill or subjugate all others? What is there to respect in believing that? Surely it demands denigration.
Are you saying it is not nice to be rude to your would-be murderers in case their sensitivities are ruffled?