The 40th anniversary of the last state-authorised execution in Australia has recently passed. We are all the better as a society for having abolished capital punishment. I remember well that fateful day on the 3rd February, 1967. I was twelve years old, having just been promoted to the large dining room at my country boarding school. Breakfast started at 7.45am. The din of 300 boys at table was always deafening. For the first and only time in my five years at the school, a handful of senior boys called for a minute’s silence at 8am to mark the hanging of Ronald Ryan in Melbourne Jail.
As Ryan dropped, you could hear a pin drop in faraway Toowoomba, Queensland. The recollection still brings goose bumps. This was wrong. It should never happen again. How could a nation do this? All Australian jurisdictions subsequently abolished the death penalty. My adolescent moral sensibilities found resonance in public debate, law reform and policy change. Values and principles mattered.
Ten years later, I had studied law and politics in Brisbane. The Queensland Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen announced, "The day of the political street march is over." He told student activists not to bother applying to the police for a permit; they would not get one. For two years, police then exercised their discretion poorly, in accordance with the premier’s wishes.
Two thousand people went to the barricades and were arrested. Ultimately there was a change of government and the law was amended, guaranteeing the right of public assembly. Public political protest bore results. Arguments about civil liberties affected the policies of at least one of the major political parties. Moral wrongs could be put right. The actions and opinions of young people mattered. Even in the wake of Sir Joh’s populist politics, values and principles mattered.
In hindsight, we give all but universal approval to legal changes such as the abolition of the death penalty and the recognition of the right to assemble peaceably. But we often overlook how outspoken and unpopular a minority of citizens had to be in order to enliven the pubic conscience, how courageous individuals had to be so that they might be true to their conscience, regardless of the prevailing orthodoxy of the establishment or public opinion of the day.
Once we move beyond the platitudes of justice and peace, how are we to act in society?
At the 1988 Yale Conference on Australian Literature,