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In light of the banking royal commission and the government's work in developing a plethora of transparency and integrity measures, it beggars belief how Brian Hartzer and Angus Taylor could bring upon themselves and their respective institutions so much unwanted publicity.
If China spies upon Australia, Australia spied on East Timor. If China detains Uighurs in harsh conditions, so has Australia detained people in brutal and demeaning conditions on Manus Island. If China lays out money to nations on our region to secure its national interests, so does Australia, most notably to Nauru and PNG.
Hopkins' words highlight how difficult it is for poets or lesser human beings to focus consistently on the particularity of each human being, let alone of each being in the world. Yet this is a necessary condition for recognising the claim that each person and the world make on us. It is no wonder that we sometimes falter in our commitment.
The fact that they so easily turned their attention away from the lives of the people threatened by fire to brawling about their own virtues and lack of them offers little hope that the lives of Australians will count with them when they reflect on the causes and the proper response to the fires.
Might the experience of humiliation open the possibility of turning out to others instead of in on oneself? Might it seed compassion for others in their humiliation, and lead in turn to a society more sensitive to the wounds that humiliation causes both to the humiliated and the bystanders?
Thirty years ago this month, the Salvadorean Armed Forces murdered two women and six Jesuits at the Universidad Centroamericana El Salvador. For me it was a significant stage on the journey from fascination with the romance and the rhetoric of the struggle for justice to recognition of the hard, unyielding daily reality that it involved.
It may seem paradoxical that one of the most effective ways of imposing silence is by imposing noise. The Romans did it with bread and circuses. More modern totalitarian regimes have done it with military processions and massive rallies. Governments in contemporary democracies do so by controlling what is fed to the media.
If we wish to persuade the public that a group of people is being treated unjustly, we portray them as innocent victims. We represent them as a class and as virtuous in order to change public opinion. Stories of violent behaviour by members of the group, however, reveal the reality that no group is uniformly composed of the virtuous and innocent.
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