The way I looked at the world changed forever when I first read Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist and great theorist of the confluence between the colonisation of land and the crushing of the spirit. Colonial Algeria, a site of incredible violence, seems like a world away from industrialised Australia in the 21st century. But it is not.
Not when we are living with laws that have been forced upon sections of our population on the basis of race and 'for their own good'. The Federal Government's shameful attempt to extend compulsory income management in an effort to get around the Racial Discrimination Act is nothing more than a cynical manoeuvre, a deliberate commitment to the American path of close supervision of people who are doing it tough.
This is insulting to the people we stand in solidarity with. This paltry effort to conceal racial discrimination leads the government into the equally dangerous waters of class discrimination.
Colonial Algeria is not a world away when the First Nations of Australia continue to live with the toxic fruits of historical colonisation and the perpetuation of the structures of internal colonisation.
It is not a world away when, in the language of the beatitudes — which, as Oscar Romero pointed out before his own violent death, have turned everything upside down — the people who hunger for justice here and now are really joined at the hip with those who hungered for justice there and then. When here and now we can make our own that poignant prayer on Fanon's lips: 'Oh my body, make of me a human who always questions!'
Good policy needs not only to arise from critical questions; it should itself provide a relentless critique of reality.
When, for example, we embarked in Australia on a road of universal free health care we were posing a question to the existing reality. The policy itself cried out: 'Who has been missing out? Why is healthcare not best left to the mechanisms of the marketplace? Why are people going to prison for failure to pay their medical debts?'
And yet, today we are burdened with a burgeoning system of private health insurance which is not only inefficient, as pointed out by such analysts as Ian McCauley, but is grossly expensive and unfair.
Recent proposals by the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission, which more deeply embed the role of private health insurance will, as John Menadue