Time to shake off our moral slumber and say: enough is enough

Jewish schools in Sydney have had to beef up security. Picture: Justin Lloyd.

I’ll never forget the moment I decided to quit my job as a TV journalist. It was Easter Monday 2003. I’d spent the weekend in a small regional town in Western Australia called Nannup, covering the drowning of three members of the same family. Two sons had dived into the water trying to save their mum, who’d been swept off rocks while fishing. I remember getting home after the long drive and saying, I’m done. I resigned that week.

What I’ve just described is known as a tipping point. Rather than the moment in isolation, that weekend was the point at which a decision I’d been wrestling with for a year became unambiguous. The culmination of nearly a decade of days and weekends like that. All of a sudden, the dam wall burst.

I feel as if Australia is on the brink of such a tipping point, don’t you?

Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing. Yes, I quit my job and the 20 years since have been a wild and wonderful ride that wouldn’t otherwise have begun. I don’t regret it for a moment, but I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t pain in the journey.

I believe we are fast approaching a moment of reckoning. We may even be in the middle of it. I’ve had that sense since Hamas’s murderous, depraved orgy of violence against Israel on October 7.

Those attacks, and the subsequent war to liberate Gaza, have acted like a giant mirror, held up against the deepest parts of who we are. The reflection, in many ways, has been ugly.

Vile anti-Semitism in the highest parts of academe, media, politics and, most shockingly, a significant section of the community, especially among younger people. This mirror has shown us as fat and forgetful. Ungrateful for freedom and unaware of the price it was purchased with. It has shown that many of our elected leaders don’t know right from wrong or, if they do, they are too spineless to take a stand.

Smoke billowing over Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip during Israeli bombardment, amid ongoing battles between Israel and Hamas. Picture: AFP

It also has shown we are living in a two-speed society. We’ve brushed off certain things happening to the Jewish community that would be an outrage if applied to any other group.

Most private schools impose a building levy on parents in addition to fees. Parents at Jewish schools pay to cover the cost of extra security. A Sydney imam regularly preaches hate sermons that include calls to kill off Jews one by one and faces zero consequences. Universities say to Jewish students, stay home and do your exams, we can’t keep you safe. Imagine if it were any other faith group or ethnicity. Yet somehow we look the other way.

More broadly, political activists masquerade as journalists and politicians. Modern-day activism in Australia is in a dark place indeed, where normally sane people defend the indefensible.

So, I wonder what it will be, the tipping point that brings us to our senses. A point at which we’re collectively arrested in a way that heals the fracturing, silences the shouting, and refocuses on who we are. It’s hard not to be slightly despondent, though. So much has happened in recent years in Australia and, yes, in Israel and Gaza that we could reasonably have expected to have been the shock that woke us up.

I was a baby journalist when Martin Bryant went on his insane killing spree at Port Arthur in 1996. In the weeks that followed we were galvanised as a nation by collective grief and horror, and led with strength and conviction. In terms of our nation’s relationship with weapons, that was a terrible, course-altering tipping point.

This war, this massacre? Yes, it’s happening far away but the waves, rather than ripples, are crashing right here in our front yard. And neither it nor example after example of domestic SNAFUs has been enough to wake us from our long afternoon nap on the couch.

So let me ask. If the tipping point wasn’t the beheading of babies or the depraved sexual brutalisation of women; not the ACT government trying to give children access to euthanasia; not Hamas merrily playing hostage execution bingo this week with those still clinging to life; not Indigenous kids, living in places that are out of sight and out of mind, being diagnosed with sexually transmitted diseases; not their mums having the living daylights belted out of them at a rate triple that of the wider population; not the crippling energy poverty striking Australia’s most vulnerable; not insane ideology being promoted over proven science – then what is?

It’s Australia Day next week. The merits of that date or otherwise I don’t care to discuss because the truth is that changing a date on a calendar won’t make a dent in the ocean of disadvantage that remains our national shame. Let others have that argument, I’ve no time for it. For me, it has prompted this reflection.

When this government was elected, I expressed hope that despite (in what I’m sure is a shocking plot twist) my conservative leanings, I believed that if the Prime Minister were to lead well, then we would all prosper. Instead of a kinder version of politics, we have had 18 months of division, acrimony, weak leadership and messy, obtuse policy. Our Foreign Minister refused to visit the sites of Hamas’s depraved violent attacks. In my respectful view, that is a terrible misstep.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong meets with Foreign Minister Israel Katz in Jerusalem on January 16. Picture: DFAT

Perhaps it’s a fool’s errand to wait for leaders to lead. I do believe, though, that if we don’t shake ourselves out of our moral slumber, we will get the communities and the country that others are willing to fight for, even if the fight is dirty and without morals. Especially if it is.

So, what’s the tipping point? Or have we already reached it?

We need to find the answer and, more important, get off the couch. We need to adjust our moral compass and our course – because things won’t get better unless we do.