Image by Webdiary artist Martin Davies.daviesart

G’Day. Lots to think about this Easter.

Here is the speech I gave to the Sydney Institute on Wednesday night. The topic was “Where the left’s at”, but I’m still trying to process the war and its terrible aftermath, so it’s more about how the experience might change the discourse. Imre Salusinszky also gave a speech on the topic, which was about his view that the war debate proved that the intellectual left is defined by anti-Americanism.

I hope you can be with people you love this Easter.

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Where the left’s at…

I guess some of you assume I’m here as a representative of the beleaguered left, taking up defensive position number 123 to ward off a rampaging member of the triumphalist right about to stick the boot in one more time.

Could we start again please?

The world, the allied and Iraqi troops, the Iraqi people, and all of us who watched it and read about this war have just been through a traumatic experience which will continue for a long time, perhaps for my lifetime.

That experience sounded, please God, the death knell for the traditional left-right dichotomy, which lost its utility a long time ago and now survives, it seems to me, as a convenient means by which commentators accuse each other of being disgusting, idiotic ideologues to the cheers of fans who stopped thinking because it got too hard. The labels are an excuse not to engage, to reassure adherents there is a certain truth, an instinctive escape from genuine conversation in an era of profound uncertainty.

I know a few people for whom expressing dissent by way of rallies and protest marches is a part of their lives. Without exception, their experience of the big weekend of protests before the war was one of awe – to a man and woman they said, in wonder, “I didn’t see anyone I know!” Humanity – all shapes, sizes, addresses, incomes, world view – cared enough to come together, in peace, to ask our leaders most sincerely if they could please find an alternative to war. Even if you supported the war, surely there was joy in seeing so many Australians, so many people around the world, having a say, trying to make a difference?

The war debate saw the traditional left split. The traditional conservatives split. The nationalists split. The realists, in general, were against a unilateral US war. No, that’s too simplistic. Australians, like peoples around the world were in many camps. No war in any circumstances. War only if the UN agreed that the weapons inspections could not disarm Iraq. Support for a US led war, but not Australia’s participation. In my case, opposition to a US war without prior disclosure of a just and democratic transition to peace by an genuine act of self determination by the Iraqi people and, ideally, a unanimous resolution of the Security Council to establish an independent state of Palestine as a top priority. BUT, if by whatever means and even if under no constraints the UN gave the green light, yes to Australia’s participation due to our reliance on the American alliance for our national security.

So the people who marched had many reasons, and represented many strands of political belief. Remember this letter to the Sydney Morning Herald way back in September last year?

“We put this conviction directly and unequivocally: it would constitute a failure of the duty of government to protect the integrity and ensure the security of this nation to commit any Australian forces in support of the US military offensive against Iraq without the backing of a specific United Nations Resolution.”

That letter was signed by former Labor Prime Ministers Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke, former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, former Liberal opposition leader John Hewson, two former chiefs of the Australian Defence Force General Peter Gration and Admiral Alan Beaumont, former navy staff chief Admiral Michael Hudson and the head of the RSL Major-General Peter Phillips.

Let’s be honest here. In my view, the fundamental split was between those who thought a US invasion would make the world a safer place, and those who thought it would make it more dangerous. For each nation, the question of its national security within a changed world was paramount. And hovering over the debate was the desperately difficult fact that the world’s only superpower had decided that, on the basis of its national interest, it would decide which nation to invade, the circumstances in which to invade it, and how the invaded country would be shaped after regime change. It was that issue, more than any other, which saw a strange new alliance formed between France, Germany, Russia and China, and which saw “right wing” leader Jacques Chirac oppose the invasion and Labour leader, Tony Blair, give it his backing.

We do not know who is right and who is wrong. We will not know for many years. Most importantly, the question is not predetermined, merely requiring revelation in time. It will depend on how the world’s nations and the world’s peoples act and react from now on.

What we’ve just been through, for the first time in my lifetime, is the peoples and the nations of the world engaged in a tumultuous, deeply unsatisfactory debate about the world’s future through the prism of one nation.

Every sensible person knew as they watched those two planes crash into the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001 that the world changed irrevocably at that moment. Since then, we’ve watched the world unite, then divide bitterly and destructively as America launched a preemptive war without disclosure of its blueprint for peace and proved to the world, starkly, that might is right.

Now, the rules of the old security order have fallen over and with them, in my view, the supposed “inevitability” of world economic globalisation, which the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers also symbolised. So also, the globalisation of environment protection and human rights – which struggle to keep up with economic globalisation – are at grave risk.

As the UN as we know it – and thus the power of the forces of internationalisation of world governance – collapsed, what the world began debating so imperfectly were the greatest, deepest and most confronting questions of all. In many types of discourses, we began discussing the values and beliefs to which we – as individuals, nations, and collective custodians of this world, our home – subscribe, and the costs we are prepared to pay to meet the demands of those values and beliefs.

For me, a piece by novelist Walter Kirn in The New York Times, summed up my experience watching the war:

“Lately what the polls seem to be demonstrating is their own pathetic inadequacy in the face of events that cut deeper than the cranium – events that can be processed only in the soul. What’s your opinion of a soldier with a head wound staggering through a sandstorm at 3 a.m.? What’s your opinion of a missile blast that collapses eight stories of reinforced concrete on top of an unknown number of civilians who were either inside the building by accident or because they’d been herded into it at gunpoint? What’s your opinion of mass panic brought on by the noise of unrelenting artillery fire and a chronic shortage of clean water? What’s your opinion of nerve gas?

… Sorry, not playing. I’m turning in my card. What’s more, I’m turning off the polls. To keep tabs on what ‘we’ think before I know what I think, and perhaps to risk shaping my own thoughts in the process, whether out of some secret longing to fit in or an unconscious desire to stand out, strikes me as a form of spiritual cheating, of shirking my obligation before the cosmos to pass through this fire naked and alone, without checking to see who’s with me and who’s not and by what magnitude and over how many days.”

Hard choices, each one having a terrible cost. No referee. No consistency. No level playing field. Shifting arguments. Fake evidence. And the certainty of all thinking people, surely, that the stated rationales for the war were untrue, that there were deeper, more fundamental reasons in play, reasons which those who rule us believed could not be openly discussed because they were ashamed of them, or because they were too confronting for us to face, or because we might interrogate them and they might discover (or do they already know?) that the peoples of the world just don’t support them.

Then war. Scenes of horror, dismemberment, liberation, anarchy, joy, hope, unimaginable pain and loss, fear, hatred, hubris… Name your adjective – list them all through the prism of the experience of the people of Iraq, blessed and cursed with its abundance of oil, torn asunder by wars of empire over thousands of years. We stared at the human condition, blinkers removed.

And then – too quickly – many of us put the blinkers back on. The debates resumed as before, only more bitter, angrier, even more divisive.

But it can’t be, can it? It doesn’t matter what your walk of life, your wealth, your philosophical or political bent – an unsafe world where bombs or other mechanisms of random death can hit anyone, anywhere, anytime means we’re all in the same boat in a world rent with terror, aren’t we? We were all able to emphasise with the tragedy of the war and the fragility of hope for the Iraqi people, weren’t we? There MUST be common ground, mustn’t there?

What is the value of a human life? What is the responsibility of those who decide they will sacrifice some innocent lives for a larger purpose? What place does Australia have in the world and what place can it realistically aspire too? What values does Australia stand for? What compromises must Australia accept to those values to keep us as safe as possible?

Left and right. Black and white. Good and evil. All or nothing. These binaries are methods of escapism from the need to examine who we are and where our society is failing us with clear, honest eyes. The left-right debate in Australia reinforces prejudice on both sides, and is both an avoidance mechanism and a dangerous tool of fanatical political tribalism. It destroys. It is hopeless. It does not reflect the diversity and nuances of the views we hold, or the extent of our common ground. It does not facilitate constructive conversation. It is an admission of the failure of public debate to achieve anything of value for society.

I suggest those of us lucky enough to be paid to think about our nation and its values, and those interested in reading and participating in that discourse take a deep breath at this momentous moment in Australian and world history, and make the assumption that each of us is in good faith and has the best interests of Australians and Australia at heart.

Let’s then explore where we differ, and why. Let’s first focus on what our core beliefs are about the individual, our society and the role of government. Then let’s see what common ground we’ve got, both in our core beliefs and principles and in our assessment of the weaknesses in the way our society and our democracy are working. You know, it’s just possible that most of us will share more core beliefs and principles than not. Most of our disagreements may well be about the best means to fulfil our common principles, and on whether we are inherently pessimistic or optimistic about the human condition.

But pessimistic or optimistic, we must find the hope in this, and nurture it for all it’s worth.

So let’s do what we always promise we’ll do next time but never do when the time comes, and look at the history of this war from September 11, when fanatics invaded America and a group of Americans called neo-cons had the clear-eyed, bright-light, absolutist, fundamentalist vision ready to put in place in response.

And let’s look back on the wreckage of the rules now gone, and consider in hindsight what could have been done differently, and how, by all the players, to achieve a more satisfactory, less brutal, less uncertain result for all of us. If we all had our time again, what would we do differently, and what would we have liked our leaders to have done differently?

And when we’ve done that, let’s dream about what a new world order might look like, that we think gives the world a better chance to survive and to maximise human freedom, happiness and dignity.

I don’t know about you, but I feel humbled by this war. It brings into sharp relief the urgent work to be done in finding a useful mechanism by which the world tackles the world’s problems, the ones no country can tackle alone. Amid destruction of the rules must come renewal, and I’m trying to think, as many of us are, about what my role could be in that, in my little world, in my little country, as a citizen of the world committed to doing my best to leaving it in the best shape I can to the children of my relatives and friends.

I’ve got lots of thoughts – too many – jumbling around my head, competing with each other for attention. Maybe some people in the audience need what I do – a process – a means by which I can converse with other people of good faith, who care about our land, our people, our country, and our world, to settle on a few basic values, to be honest about the constraints individuals are under, in their individual circumstances, in giving them full rein, and to work across old political divides to find, encourage and support leaders who will help us all nurture our hope, and put the energy that gives to good purpose.

No-one has “the truth” any more. We all know it, in our hearts, though so many of us pretend not to, for fear of what that means, and the consequences that might follow for our careers if we dropped our pretence. And partly because of these left-right barriers, we can’t seem to get together and talk things through any more. And agree, politely, to disagree on some matters, and have the courage to agree, with relief, on others, and put our heads together to push those common ideals along.

When an old order falls, there is the chance to rebuild a better one. This is a time of vulnerability and fear. Thinkers can exacerbate those feelings, or facilitate honest conversation with each other to do our bit to rebuild community spirit and regenerate a shared value system.

The people in this country and this world need to trust, and need to hope. The left-right debate doesn’t engender either. Could we start again, please?