Fitzgerald's proof that politics can make a better world

20 August 2012

Friday evening's Eureka Street Discerning Conversation between former prime minister Kevin Rudd and our own Fr Frank Brennan was billed as being about the 'things that matter'. The event took place at Melbourne University to celebrate Eureka Street's 21st birthday.

It was the end of a week during which federal parliament enacted legislation for offshore refugee processing.

In a rare bipartisan moment, politicians acted on their collective reading of the mind of the Australian electorate. According to this, what matters to Australians is keeping our lifestyle to ourselves by locking asylum seekers up for many years. Preservation of a set of comforts was considered to matter more than compassion for people who, in their own countries, lacked basic human securities.

If there was a message from Friday evening's conversation, it was that things don't have to be like that.

In the course of their discernment of the will of the Australian people, politicians can choose between attending to our base instincts or to our aspiration for higher humanity. The high road is the more challenging option that involves short-term pain for the sake of long-term gain for all of us, and the risk of electoral oblivion for politicians.

The Rudd-Brennan conversation began with recollections from their common home state Queensland in which politicians opted for the high road several decades ago to the benefit of the whole population. The turning point was the political acceptance of the findings of the Fitzgerald Inquiry into Police Corruption (1987–89) and the putting in place of a range of checks and balances to ensure greed no longer holds sway over the common good.

Brennan remembered Eureka Street was launched 21 years ago by the head of that commission, Tony Fitzgerald, who 'spoke at the opening about the need for the world of ideas and greater transparency in Australian society'.

Rudd responded: 'If you reflect back on what things were like in the late '80s compared to what things are like now, you can see the profound nature of changes that have come about. In that context, Fitzgerald played no small part ... You could have had entrenched racism and entrenched sexism [rather than] deep societal change.'

Apologists for political culture describe politics as the art of the possible, often in an attempt to excuse compromise that is actually veiled greed. Fitzgerald paved the way for a politics that demonstrated decisively that politics is indeed the art of the possible, and that the common good

AUSTRALIA

Fitzgerald's proof that politics can make a better world

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