The preamble to the American Declaration of Independence opens with, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But what is happiness?

What would make you happy? Is it more than ‘feeling happy’?

More than walking around with a smug look of satisfaction?

More than having all the things you have?

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) wrote that happiness is “Being well deceived; the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves.”

The American author Willa Cather (1873-1947) defined happiness as the state of “Being dissolved into something complete and great.” Both definitions have an air of surreality about them, a sense that happiness is illusionary, yet the quest for happiness remains one of life’s great challenges. With Swift, being a fool among knaves, deceitful, dishonest, unscrupulous people, where as with Cather, the idea of something complete and great is really a very nebulous concept, it could be for her completing a great novel such as the Pulitzer Prize winning One of Ours, set in World War 1, or it could be for a terrorist that a mass killing is is something complete and great, flying two aircraft into the twin towers in New York 9/11/2001, something complete and great.

Or happiness could be winning an event, putting some-one you are in conflict with in their place. Your team winning the season’s Grand Final, your horse coming in as the winner of the Melbourne Cup, your favoured candidate winning an election, any number of ‘wins’. But for every win, there are others who do not share that happiness, for them the event was a loss.

Happiness doesn’t need to be about winning a contested battle, it can be a sense of satisfaction, in Positive Psychology, happiness is defined as ‘an enduring state of mind consisting not only of feelings of joy, contentment and other positive emotions, but also a sense that one’s life is meaningful and valued’.

The bit about ‘enduring state of mind’ is interesting. Can we be happy all the time, can life be so good that it is filled with ‘joy, contentment and other positive emotions’ all the time, or is are there times when the sense of happiness is challenged?

Does happiness come to us from external influences, or does it become something intrinsic? The consideration of the ‘sense that one’s life is meaningful and valued’ becomes part of the equation. How does that work?

These questions are not just some esoteric ramblings of a old man with too much time on his hands, they are important in considering not just our own happiness, but the quality of lives we can influence.

Would it make Vladimir Putin happy if Ukraine gave up its quest to remain independent and allowed Russia to take control of its people, its economy and its culture, or would that be just a stepping stone to find other parts of eastern Europe to subsume into Greater Russia. Would it really make Benjamin Netanyahu happy if Hamas and Hezbollah surrendered to the Israelis, continuing the ethnic cleansing of Israel to realise the promise made to Abraham after his fight with God as told in the Biblical book of Genesis.

They are big questions which we, as very ordinary people cannot answer, but what we can answer is how we deal with those within our sphere of influence, the family, friends, work colleagues and other people we meet socially or through other connections.

And so much of that depends on how we view ourselves. How we answer the Socratic question, What sort of person should I be? It’s not a question of telling others what sort of people they should be, it is very much a personal question. It flows into a series of sub questions including ‘What kind of life should I lead?’, ‘What values should I live by?’ ‘What should be my aims in life?’ and ‘What really matters?’

I had a work colleague who plays an ancient stringed instrument, the oud, and when ever he performs with one of the two ensembles he is part of I go to listen to their performance. About a year ago, I sensed that his music was free-er, more confident than previously, and when I told him what I thought, he said he understood that he would never be as good as the professional player he idolised and tried to emulate, that he should play for his own enjoyment. He had judged himself by a standard that he imposed on himself, it restricted him, it tied him down. Up until he released himself from that bond, he never felt quite good enough, now he is blossoming. I have seen him three times since then, and the joy he has from playing is so very evident, and it has reflected so much on other aspects of his life.

And that is part of our problem isn’t it, when we are set the standards by some external force whether imposed or by choice?

In relationships, to allow our partners to be who they are, that we can be who we are, that we do not ask for change from our partners but we accept them for who they are. Isn’t that what the initial attraction was about?

How high is the bar that religion places on us, read the bit in Genesis about the fall and banishment from the garden of Eden. For having dared to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil all humanity, all the descendants of Adam and Eve are punished. Read the Ten Commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy, read the minor laws given to the Israelites after their escape from Egypt, these are the foundational laws, rules that religions place on us. As part of those laws, relationship issues, sex, are included, the matter of adultery, the matter of homosexuality. Interestingly, I believe homosexuality is mentioned twice, but I am ready to be corrected, while adultery is mentioned more times that I care to count, yet the focus of most religions is on homosexuality, with the occasional reference to adultery. But the expression of guilt, the cloud hanging over the pew sitter is one of condemnation except through you know who, but the layers of guilt are built on, week after week, sermon after sermon, the whole idea that we are just not able to live up to the standards laid down. Those who revel in the ‘forgiveness’ of Christ become at times a bit sneeringly judgemental at those who refuse to be ‘washed by the blood of Jesus’.

Those external forces are not limited to religion and politics; materialism is a great driver of unhappiness, the quest to have it all, to never be satisfied with what we have, to be on the lookout for the latest fashion, the newest furniture, the latest gizmo. To be like or preferably better than ’the Jones’s’

For the power-brokers, be they religious or political, the condemnation they bring for their sense of happiness has seen rivers of blood through the ages, and they continue today, the sense of superiority because of their self-righteousness devalues lives which do not conform to their criteria. The conflicts, especially between the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam continues today in the Middle East, the superiority once the claim of being of God’s People means that throughout the European colonisation of Africa, the Americas and Asia, indigenous lives were valueless.

Christopher Columbus befriended an indigenous leader in what is now Haiti, managed teach him basic language and wrote in his journal that he could ‘Christianise him and take him back to be a slave for the Queen’. The quest for the newly ‘discovered’ lands over the next five hundred years have seen indigenous populations decimated through war, kidnapping for enslavement and mass deaths through diseases such as small pox.

The plight of the Palestinian people in Gaza and in the West Bank is treated with the same contempt.

But we cannot solve those problems, they really are not ours to solve, except as one person said to me this morning over coffee, that we should allow more refugees in, we need to be more humane. We can carry that burden as we talk to our politicians, and hopefully they will listen.

So coming to what we can influence, what we can do to be happy, to have happiness.

We can ourselves the Socratic questions, and in the at times heated discussions we can have over the political issues which can divide us, remember that the greatest unifiers that we have are the arts, music, dance, art, literature, love.

Ultimately there are four things that mark our lives, that impact on how we live our lives, our state of happiness:

Death: The great inevitable.

Love: The great desire.

Meaning: The great mystery.

Happiness: The great hope.

How we answer the Socratic questions for ourselves determines how we will live and deal with the four ‘greats’.

As I recall, the opening scene of the 2005 movie “Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman” see a woman who had been executed, hanged, removed from the hangman’s rope and prepared for burial.

Here is a definition of justice. Does this seem reasonable?

“Justice is the ethical, philosophical idea that people are to be treated impartially, fairly, properly and reasonably by the law and the arbiters of the law, that laws are to ensure that no harm befalls another and that where harm is alleged, a remedial action is taken – both the accuser and accused receive a morally right consequence merited by their actions.” (Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute)

How do we arrive at a ‘morally right consequence’ which is fair to both the perpetrator and the victim? Is justice served through revenge or vengeance or is there more to it?

Instead of satisfying a sense of morality, should the consequence be measured on an ethical basis? And how would that be different?

The destruction of Gaza and the year-long war which now envelopes Israel and Lebanon and threatens to spread to include other countries, is that justice for the horrors, the war crime committed by Hamas of October 7 last year, or is in an act of vengeance, going well beyond any sense of justice where it appears there is the collective punishment of those Palestinians who live in Hamas controlled Gaza?

But justice works at less dramatic levels too, less destructive, where an injury is done, a theft committed, an ego dented. So what constitutes ‘Justice’?

A teenager in youth detention suicides and through both the grieving process of the child’s family and the Coronial enquiry into the death, the parents and the legal system are seeking a sense of justice which includes a claim for a settlement payment of several million dollars.

One of the cases described in Dexter Dias’s book, “The Ten Types of Humans” tells of a young boy who was killed while in youth detention in Britain. The description follows the boy’s movements, silently on the video cameras in the facility, and also the guards who followed him and entered his cell, emerging a few minutes later. The child was dead. The grief of the mother who had lost her son, who was supposedly in the custody of the facility is raw as she suffers the inexplicable loss of her child.

What does justice look like when a child dies in the custody of a government facility?

Time and again we view court-step interviews where those who have been aggrieved through crime, whether it be property damage, injury or death through a road accident explain that the punishment meted out does not satisfy their sense of justice.

The questions are complex and must also consider who determines what justice is in a legal sense, who writes the laws and prescribes the penalties for contravention of those laws.

The 1723 Black Act was passed in England after groups of poachers took part in a series of poaching raids. The act made hunting deer, rabbits or hare a crime that was punishable by death. What the act does not describe is why people were poaching, effectively stealing wildlife from forests, hence stealing from the king’s or other wealthy land owner’s lands, not necessarily because they were sportsmen hunting as in the sport of fox hunts, but because with the enclosures which had rendered so many former peasants destitute, the hunting of wildlife was a matter of survival, staving off starvation.

An examination of the crimes committed by the convicts of the First Fleet which arrived at Botany Bay in January of 1788, we see that there were some serious criminals, the crimes of assault and highway robbery are listed, but most convicts had committed non violent crimes, mainly theft, stealing livestock, clothes, bedding, or even an apple – survival items for people living in poverty, but also luxury items such as watches and handkerchiefs which could be sold to buy the necessities of life. Although a fictional account, the novel “Moll Flanders” by Daniel Defoe, first published in 1722, describes the desperate measures taken for the poor to survive in England at that time.

The laws were to protect those who had the most, to dispose of those who were a bit of an embarrassment really, those who lived rough, who stole, who sold themselves in prostitution.

Laws currently being legislated in the Northern Territory reduce the age of criminal accountability to ten years of age, effectively criminalising the behaviour of children. Similar laws are being proposed for Queensland in the ‘law and order’ election campaign in that state. While the politicians who are enacting or proposing those laws state that they are not discriminating against any particular group of people, any one with eyes to see and ears to hear will understand that there is a distinct racist element inherent in the laws and proposed laws. The incarceration rateof First Nations people is hugely disproportionate in all Australian jurisdictions, as it is for children and teenagers in the juvenile justice system.

Those laws effectively criminalise being Aboriginal.

The ethical dilemma for justice is, in part, who the laws are targeted at and who are protected by the laws, either through ignoring unethical behaviour or who through positions of privilege or power are somehow above the law.

Theft is easy to prosecute when a person steals a trolley full of food from the local supermarket. It is not so easy to prosecute when that supermarket increases prices to increase its profitability so that the shareholders can ‘earn’ a greater dividend for their investment. As recently highlighted, the deceptive advertising of discounted goods and the increased profits published for the major supermarket chains. Is that theft? No, of course not, it is business people doing what business people do, maximising profit for their shareholders, which after all is their primary responsibility. So the behaviour is morally acceptable, satisfying the morality of business, but is it ethical?

Does the justice system criminalise the powerless, but ignore those with the most power, does it criminalise children and poor people and First Nations people but give a pass to those with the most power, the wealthiest, the most privileged?

Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,
Nothin’ don’t mean nothin’, if it ain’t free.
If feelin’ good was easy lord, when he sang the blues,
You know feelin’ good was good enough for me,
Good enough for me and Bobby McGee.
(Kris Kristofferson, 1969).

It’s been eighteen months now since last I went to work. The transition went quite smoothly really, going from working afternoon shift, ten hour work days plus an hour or so of commute down to a whole lot of open ended spare time.

Freedom!

I did not know that freedom was actually quite daunting. Losing the ‘corporate-ness’, the thinking in terms of the allocated work, the uniform, relationships more focussed on the workplace than really getting to know people, the guide-rails of judgement to know when things were not quite right. To suddenly lose that sense of belonging, even if there were constraints in place. To lose another form of self definition, that of worker, earner, tax payer, employee, work mate and so forth.

How quickly the time has filled with activities and a connection with community, engaging in community-based activities and the freedom to hook up the caravan and travel, unpressured by time, a closely planned couple of days can stretch into a week or two. The occasional commitment to a family activity, birthdays, weddings, that sort of stuff, and of course the commitment to the various group activities taken on.

Last week we cancelled everything, my partner and I went south the the Margaret River region to visit a number of artist studios during their Open Studios event, to marvel at the creativity of the various artists, the different ways in which these superbly talented people express their ideas through various mediums, canvas, photography, etchings, sculptures, a seemingly endless way of producing amazing works of art. The freedom of expression in art is beautiful.

To see old bits of ‘junk’ repurposed into something beautiful. The creative freedom to imagine and re-imagine things, old bits of rusted machinery or discarded traffic signs made into sculptures, a cheeky looking kookaburra made of recycled copper pipe, stuck on a recycled jarrah fence post.

Or the Flying Monkey, the narcissist toying with the mind of its victim, made from up-cycled gas cylinders and landscape supplies. Therapy for the sculptor perhaps but a fun item to have hanging around in the garden.

But most importantly to have the opportunity to talk with the various artists, engage in conversations about their work, their motivations, their lives. The word ‘freedom’ came up in a number of conversations, freedom in various contexts.

There were a number of artists who really stood out and opened up in conversation about their journey and the freedom, the liberation they found in their crafts. A landscape photographer who collaborates with local artists who reimagine his photographs, one of a boab tree in the Kimberly became the model for a sculpted tree made of recycled steel and corrugated iron, and another artist depicted it on a canvas. The freedom to let creativity flow, to share the experiences which allow others to grow.

Freedom of association was an interesting topic with one artist. His work crosses cultural borders, mixing all sort of images and icons to produce thought provoking work. This one is ‘Superman meets the Archangel Gabriel at the Widgi Sheepdog Trials’. Ah the fun mixing of cultures and times, sheepdog trials, superman and the Archangel? But they work together wonderfully.

My thoughts went to Salman Rushdie who also plays with the interactions of different cultures… and it nearly cost him his life. This artist has not been subjected to a fatwa.

Discussions included the freedom one artist has given to his children as they grew up. They are now adults, but the house was filled with fun activities, photography, art and music, sport, games, adventures. The freedom had some guide rails, but encouraged the children to follow their dreams within the constraints of both family life and engagement with community. But the deepest conversation was with a man who’s wife suffers dementia.

Life brings its challenges but to live with dementia, to see a loved one lose connection is painful both for the patient and their carer. And it brings questions on the freedom to end one’s life.

One of the recent changes we have seen is for Voluntary Assisted Dying to be an option for a sufferer, but the limits to it include that the person must be of ‘sound mind’ and able to willingly take the medication that will end their life. A person with dementia does not satisfy that criteria. They are not ‘of sound mind’ and may not be able to self administer the medication as required by the legislation. Would a ‘living will’ satisfy that criteria, if I were to write a will that states that if I was so far gone with dementia that I recognise no-one, remember nothing and life has become meaningless, that some qualified medical person who would under the current legislation supervise the action, can administer the medication to end my life? Is that a freedom too far?

I guess we really need to look at what freedom really means in the most critical of times, more than just the freedom of expression, the freedom to live life as we choose. One person in the discussion mentioned that someone she knew suggested they should form a committee to demand freedoms, propose it to politicians that freedoms should be legislated, but that appears a littler counterintuitive to me. By demanding freedoms, surely that is freedoms as defined by the committee or the parliament of the day. In fact, such a move could restrict freedoms much the same as ‘morality police’ have done through the ages.

So if the definition of freedom is as broad as the dictionaries suggest, that it is the power to act, speak or think as one wants, should there be some sort of guide rails there? In the case of a dementia sufferer and the freedom to ask for life to end before the dementia established itself to make life seemingly meaningless, is that an unreasonable freedom? And who should decide?

Or is freedom broad enough to allow me to vilify someone who disagrees with me? Does freedom of speech allow an accusation of supporting terrorism because someone sees the inhumanity of war and promotes a humanitarian response to the suffering war brings about?

Or does freedom give license to name call people who you don’t like, whether disparaging racist terms or attacking their sexuality whether out and about in a social setting or on the football field.

Perhaps freedom is singing Me and Bobby McGee as we wander around. But there may be some who would ask us to stop because they don’t like the song.

How free should freedom be?

Politically the world seems to be moving very much to the right, and with it there is an attack on thinking, especially critical thinking where an issue is questioned, analysed, interpreted and evaluated to make a judgement about the issue.

Critical thinking is a dangerous activity, and should be banned. It has been a problem for a long time. In ancient Greece, Socrates was forced to drink a beaker of hemlock to silence him, to stop him from teaching young people of Athens to think since the thinking led to questioning of how the city elders were behaving. Socrates knew how little he knew as opposed to the power elite of Athens who knew everything. They saw that Socrates encouraging young people to think was a threat to their authority, so Socrates had to go.

Don’t question the superiority of the race which dominated the world for over 5 centuries, the White European colonisers. The intolerance that we see expressed in so many ways as political and racist bigotry also has its origins in colonialism. In his introduction to Empire: How Britain made the modern world, Niall Ferguson quotes an excerpt from the 2001 Durban Declaration of the World Conference against Racism:

… Colonialism has led to racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and… Africans and people of African descent and indigenous peoples were victims of colonialism and continue to be victims of its consequences.

The danger of critical thinking is that it allows the examination of the origins of bigotry, of discrimination, of seeing ‘difference’ in its many forms, in colour, in creed, in self identification, in politics, and in responses to the humanitarian crisis refugees and statelessness presents.

Thinking, especially critical thinking threatens authoritarian leaders and so they target protesters and universities which encourage critical thinking to quell dissent.

We have seen, since the beginning of the conflict in Gaza, protests about the brutality of the Israeli response to the vicious, murderous terrorist attack on a music festival on October 7 last year, an attack which saw 1200 people killed and 250 taken as hostages, probably as bargaining chips to negotiate a more sustainable life for the 2.3 million people crammed into the Gaza strip, dependent on Israel for the provision of basic life essentials such as food, water sewerage, power. Not one of the protesters supported Hamas and their terrorist act, but were appealing that the wholesale destruction of Gaza be stopped. But the protests were seen as supporting Hamas, supporting terrorism, antisemitic, anti Israel’s right to defend itself. The universities were criticised for allowing the protests on university campuses.

And under no circumstances mention that the Israeli military used the ‘Hannibal Directive’ against the terrorists, resulting the IDF killing many of its own citizens and soldiers as they drove the Hamas attackers back to Gaza.

The protesters separate the October attack from the destruction of Gaza and the apparent genocide of the Palestinians living in Gaza. To be pro Palestinian is not to be anti-Israel, it is not antisemitic. Critical thinking makes that distinction, but it is politically uncomfortable for the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu and in the various governments which support him, including Australia. October 7, it is better to believe, came out of the blue, it has nothing to do with the treatment of the Palestinians of Gaza and their treatment over the years since the Nakba of 1948.

There are many other examples on autocratic leaders quelling dissent, attacking universities for questioning various policies and discriminatory practice. The New York Times in February reported that universities in India were anti-India according to the Prime Minister who promotes a Nationalistic form of Hindu, as he discriminates against the Sikh and Muslim communities in India.

In Pakistan, peaceful student protests objected to the imprisonment of former PM Imran Khan and the ban on the press even so much as mentioning him, have threatened nation wide protests if Khan is not freed by August 30. Khan is in prison on charges of an illegal marriage and regarding state secrets which saw him imprisoned in February on what are considered trumped up charges. The response to the threat of protests has been for the government to introduce bills restricting the right to protest.

Similarly in Bangladesh, student protests questioning a government decision to allocate certain government jobs to a favoured elite were met with a violent crackdown but continued protest and support for the students from the military saw the autocratic Prime Minister, Sheik Hasina flee the country, at this stage a victory for the students and a victory for the right to protest and to question government decisions.

In each case. in each country the news is censored, the true situation is withheld from the citizens. I know a Russian family who arrived here about four years ago, they cannot understand the ‘lies’ told in Australian news broadcasts, and how they differ from the Russian news they get through the internet regarding the Ukraine conflict.

Difference is not to be tolerated. This is most apparent in issues such as immigration where despite there being around 117.3 million forcibly displaced people in the world at the end of 2023, according to the UNHCR report, not including those wishing to flee Gaza as that enclave continues to be razed to the ground. It seems no country wants them.

It is far easier to dismiss the very idea that there can be four times the population of this country seeking somewhere to live since for any number of reasons they cannot live in their homelands.

Turning to the dumbing down of political rhetoric here in Australia, we had the negative campaign against the Voice referendum, ‘If you don’t know, vote no’, the rejection by the opposition to explore the violence of colonialism by promoting ‘Truth Telling’. To listen to indigenous people on land use, to criminalise young offenders by making the age of criminal accountability 10 years, before children are mature enough to make such distinctions, to treat young people charged with ‘adult crimes’ as adults, to mete out ‘adult time’ on conviction.

On immigration, the simplistic ‘Turn Back The Boats’ slogan and ensuring that no asylum seeker arriving as ‘boat people’ are denied entry to Australia, but are sent to off shore detention facilities, denied the respect enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, effectively criminalised and imprisoned without trial. To effectively claim any Palestinian seeking to come here from the hell hole of Gaza is a Hamas supporter, hence a terrorist and denied a visa despite passing through at least three security checks.

Don’t think too deeply on the ‘crime waves’ committed by young people. Don’t think too deeply about what causes children to be ‘criminal’, don’t look too deeply at the socio-economic situation of their families, or that they may even have been state wards, taken away from troubled households but offering little or no support to those house holds.

Don’t think for a moment that the lives of two teenagers in custody in Western Australia could have been saved though a better system than one which criminalises poverty and dysfunctional family life. Solve the problems by being ‘tough on crime’. Lock them up and throw away the key!

Don’t think that people seeking refugee status are really desperate, they could be criminals, murderers, rapists, terrorists. Don’t think for a moment that 117.3 million people are forced to flee from their homelands because of wars, religious conflict, famine, discrimination or any other life threatening situation. If they cannot afford a plane ticket and visa to arrive here legally, as tourists and overstay their tourist visa, they are not welcome.

I recently posed a question during a discussion, to consider where the animosity between religions comes from, both in terms of religious texts and holy books, the practice of these faiths including the divisions within those faiths (sects or denominations), the story of colonialism including the cultural and economic influences as a result of colonialism. Also to consider the situations for those nations after the colonial powers left.

One response was that I align with terrorists.

Don’t think too deeply, don’t engage in critical thinking.

Ever.

You may be considered to be aligned with criminals or terrorists.

Election fever is hitting Queensland, and Law and Order is high on the agenda. And the problems Indigenous kids present are front and centre. And the economy as the campaign rollings along… Labor are not able to run the economy, look at the cost of living, inflation, interest rates, housing costs.

Taking a leaf out of the recent Northern Territory campaign which saw Labor representation reduced to two seats with LNP the promise to deal with youth crime, by reducing the age of criminal accountability to 10 years and on the economic front to reduce restrictions on the destruction of the environment by promoting broader farming reliant on ground water sourced irrigation the campaigning is reduced to simplistic sloganeering, tough on crime and the economy.

March next year it is election time in Western Australian and the Liberals are taking heart and looking closely at the campaign run in the NT to reclaim previously lost ground. A simple message: Labor is weak on crime and the economy, so we criminalise kids and ‘drill, baby drill’ drill to exploit natural gas, jobs, jobs jobs, (profits, profits, profits for those who have already got the most) and bugger the environment.

And hot on the heels of the state election will be the Federal election with Dutton leading the charge in a quest to regain ground lost last time around, a fairer distribution of GST, Western Australia gets way too much, the economy, drill baby drill some more, let’s go nuclear and lets get real tough on crime… especially poor people who resort to crime, bring in the army to bring to heal rampaging kids in Alice Springs or Townsville or Broome, but leave the corporate criminals alone, those who don’t pay taxes on their million dollar incomes, those giant corporations who provide so much employment but manage to off shore their profits to tax havens while demanding infrastructure, roads, ports, airports, the billionaires who fund pet projects in preference to paying taxes.

Tough on crime is problematic. How tough do we need to be to reduce crime? Especially uncontrolled kids stealing cars, doing drugs and drinking alcohol?

Does lowering the age that a kid can be called a criminal and face sanctions including youth detention the answer?

Youth detention in the Northern Territory, Western Australia, Queensland have been in the news in recent times, but is an issue in all places around the country.

Kids being abused, beaten while in detention, locked away in solitary confinement with a minimal amount of sunshine time has seen the detention centre in Western Australia, Banksia Hill almost destroyed as kids rioted, that forced the government to open a unit in an adult prison for kids. That worked really well, as the recent coronial inquest into the death by suicide of a young man demonstrated. The staff in the adult prison were not trained in dealing with kids, and were negligent in their duties. And a son, a brother, a friend died needlessly.

And then just last week another young man in youth detention suicided.

How tough on crime do we need to be? Or could it be that there are some specific issues these young, mainly Indigenous young people face which need to be focussed on?

Could it be that kids who are disengaged in schools are giving some serious clues that they may be facing some issues?

Could it be that in this wealthy nation we could throw a bit of money to establish some intervention programmes, like taking those kids out of the school environment, where they hardly attend (absenteeism is a pretty good indicator that there are issues) and perhaps guide them through some of these issues, get them ‘work ready’ through finding suitable TAFE or apprenticeship programmes, have empathetic councillors available to walk and talk them through some of the life issues they face, oh and possibly, just maybe find a means of engaging their parents in such an endeavour? Maybe even connect them with their Indigenous cultures with time on country with an elder to take them through an understanding of who they are?

The problems faced by Indigenous people is that they have not really been listened to in the past. (What a good idea it would be to find a means of listening to them rather than have them be told what is needed… something like giving them a VOICE!)

I recently picked up a book first published in 1997 (and recently updated). The newest edition included a foreword which highlighted the need for an Aboriginal voice to be heard since successive governments rewrite the rules of engagement to suit them, rather than to listen to those who need most to be heard. The book is called Grog Wars, by Alexis Wright, dealing with alcohol issues and domestic violence in Tennant Creek. The conflict between the business needs of the hotels, bottle shops and night clubs, the claim of a ‘human right’ to drink being restricted from some members of the Tennant Creek community through restricted trading hours, especially on pension days, the marketing strength of the alcohol drink manufacturers, the resistance to understanding Indigenous needs and the deafness of politicians to try to understand the damage alcohol was doing to the town culture and the Aboriginal communities of Tennant Creek. It is an ongoing issue, not just in Tennant Creek but throughout Australia.

Law and order probably means building more prisons and juvenile detention centres to further disenfranchise the most marginalised members of our communities, effectively criminalising their poverty. I do wonder if by being tough on law and order, politicians would welcome restrictions on alcohol in all the parliaments… and perhaps even drug and alcohol testing as is carried out in many work places. Barnaby Joyce may have a bit of a problem with that, his is just the first name which comes to mind, but I am confident that he is not alone in liking a bit to drink now and again… and then there are those rumoured to enjoy other substances.

Maybe, just maybe, by being a little more creative in dealing with social issues such as drug and alcohol abuse and family violence the Law and Order debate can focus on how to help people deal with the ‘shit life syndrome’ which is so often the cause of the addictions and subsequent behavioural issues.

Now, what about the economy, how can it be demonstrated that Labor are pretty useless when it comes to ‘the economy’? They stand in the way, placing too many obstacles in the path of unfettered development. (Don’t mention that there have been budget surpluses during the current Labor government).

Is ‘the economy’ all about development, changing the environment, using the environment as a resource to develop new industries, new crops to grow, more resources to drill and dig up, despite the ever growing recognition that the environment is under threat, climate change is bringing home these problems we were warned about?

It would appear so.

On the ABC’s Four Corners programme a couple of weeks ago, the development of new crops including cotton are the new economic drivers in the Northern Territory. Cotton is a thirsty crop, and irrigated water is a limited resource. The license to use the water for the cotton crop is almost limitless, and it is free; the agreement does not apply a charge for the water drawn from the aquifer. The cotton industry in Queensland and Northern New South Wales has been the major cause for the destruction of the Murray Darling River system.

Indigenous people – the traditional owners – have expressed their concern that the draw of water from the aquifer is damaging the flow of ground water in the streams and creeks which have sustained life over many thousands of years, but the flow is reducing, and the water quality is compromised meaning that traditional food sources are being compromised.

If water quality is compromised because of the destruction of its course, it means that the development of new agriculture is nor sustainable in the long term. A bit like mining really, when the ore body is gone, the mine closes, the employment generated disappears and the environment has a giant hole in it. Or the aquifer no longer sustains life not just for cotton or what ever other new, thirsty crop was grown, but the natural environment is destroyed. The vegetation which for countless eons has sustained life dies.

Again, listen to the Indigenous voice: their song lines which tell the story of the land, which have been the songs of survival in the harsh environment for many thousands of years. The land is sacred, and the Indigenous people know it intimately.

Ah, the economy. Live sheep exports are coming to an end and the sheep farmers are not happy. Labor’s doing. Yet the market for the meat of those animals will not just disappear. Again, a bit of creative thinking... perhaps new abattoirs can be built in regional centres, and packaged meats can be shipped to the markets. Oh, an airport close by and aircraft loaded with frozen meats can deliver same day to anywhere in the world. Employment opportunities in regional areas. Not such a silly idea, is it?

Especially not such a silly idea when the alcohol-fuelled crime rates in regional areas are a significant problem, the ‘shit life syndrome’ problem where people resort to drugs and alcohol and get into trouble because there is no employment, no sense of self worth through being able to afford to live a normal life, from being dependent on the welfare cheque rather than a wage or salary, of having too much time with nothing to do, to get into trouble, to have to build more prisons and youth detention centres because we are tough on crime, law and order is the go! Lock ‘em up, even kids as young as 10.

Election slogans with no substance, looking for quick fixes for complex problems make for easy wins from a disengaged population. But do not form the basis for tackling the problems we face.

The original story set in Russian Ukraine of the play and film Fiddler on the Roof is more than about a poor Jewish man, Tevye, having trouble with one of his daughters. She has eloped with a Christian. It is far deeper than a father concerned about star crossed lovers, it is more than just one daughter, in fact the star crossed lover is just one of five daughters to marry off. The oldest has an offer from the rich butcher but she is in love with the poor tailor, the second is also presenting some drama as she is courted by a young revolutionary who is filling her head with radical politics. And the third daughter runs off with the Christian literature fan. There are two younger daughters yet to grow up to be troublesome. Life seems to be falling apart, the traditional values with the father being listened to, his authority being accepted all up in the air.

Life would be so much sweeter if only he was a rich man. Ah, to ‘build a big tall house with rooms by the dozen, right in the middle of the town’, what a dream!

And then there is the revolution.

Russia was in trouble. In 1905 it was struggling with the humiliation of losing the the Russo-Japanese war and social unrest as workers were starving, but the aristocracy were living off the fat of the land. Imperial growth from the mid 18th century had seen at the inclusion of parts of Eastern Europe into Greater Russia and with it a large population of Jews. Religious conflict followed as the control of Russian Orthodox was threatened. A number of pogroms followed, including a severe one in 1903. The Jews were targeted, partly as a deflection from the real issues which were besetting Russia at the time.

So, getting back to the story, to the Fiddler on the Roof, not only was Tevye having trouble with his daughters, but he and his Jewish neighbours were being forced out of the village they lived in, being moved on to ‘anywhere but here’. The mantra in part was convert to ‘our’ religion or move. But where to? Other parts of European Russia was forbidden unless they converted, a bit like the acceptance of Jews into Catholic Spain seven hundred years earlier, there the Spanish Inquisition was established to ensure compliance. So it was convert or move to Siberia, the Caucasus, the Far East or Central Asia, the far flung outposts of the Russian Empire or perhaps even America.

Look the other way, it’s the Jews who are the problem here, look the other way, nothing to see here, look the other way.

Throughout the Christian era it has been the same for Jews. Things got tough, blame the outliers, blame those at the fringes, blame the Jews, after all, they killed Christ, didn’t they?

Russian pogroms through the nineteenth century saw millions of Jews escape to the USA, where their mark on culture and business is most visible; in music, Bernstein, Gershwin, Mendelssohn, more recently, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, Bette Midler, Billy Joel just to name a few. Movies; Warner Brothers, MGM, the Cohen Brothers, Weinstein, again the list goes on and on. In business too, some of the most successful are Jewish, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan and so that list too goes on and on. In literature too, Jews are prominent. Writers such as Gertrude Stein, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, again just to mention a few.

Much of the resentment against Jews has been because of their ability to be successful without considering why this happens, why so many are so very successful, and that too lies in their history. As being perpetually marginalised but having a religion based of a written coda, and learning to deal with money to create wealth because they were denied the right to own land, the traditional foundation of wealth throughout Europe, they developed skills which were marketable in other fields; finance, entertainment, the arts, business as well as in academia.

The resentment continues. In the USA the KKK also targeted Jews and Jewish establishments and even in recent times, with the recent increase in racial violence, attacks on Synagogs have been reported.

Is it any wonder then that the creation of Zionism in the late nineteenth century focussed on establishing a safe place for the Jewish population, a safe place to practice their religion, and what better place than the lands promised in their holy books, the land of Israel as promised to their forefather Abraham thousands of years ago. A safe place to be who they are, Jews. After the shock of the Holocaust, international sympathy grew so that on November 29, 1947 the General Assembly of the newly formed United Nations adopted a resolution for the establishment of an Independent Jewish State in Palestine, partitioning the Mandated British Protectorate of Palestine into two economic zones, effectively, a two state agreement.

Immediately after the signing of the UN agreement, the Israeli leadership which included the first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion as well as several men to become Prime Ministers later including Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin who had been part of a ‘terrorist’ group Irgun, fighting against the British occupation prior to 1947 which included the bombing of the British headquarters in the King David Hotel in TelAviv killing 91 people.

The fight to establish a safe place for Jews, or Israelis continues today, but the agreement made by signing the establishment of Israel and the partitioning of the region was quickly contested with the ethnic cleansing of Israel: the bulldozing of Palestinian villages, displacing over 750,000 Palestinians as refugees who sought sanctuary in neighbouring Syria, Lebanon and Jordan where many of their descendants still live in refugee camps. Other Palestinians were settled in the Gaza Strip, where they have been ever since.

The attack by Hamas on 7 October last year was on farms and villages which were Palestinian lands prior to 1947. (I am not condoning or minimising that attack in any way.)

The wars of 1967 and 1973 saw Israeli forces occupy East Jerusalem, The West Bank and Golan Heights which have remained as occupied territory since, but under UN conventions and international law remain Palestinian Territories and cannot be claimed as part of Israel, although Israel prefers the term ‘Disputed Territories’ and has engaged in development of Israeli settlements throughout the region.

Since October 7 last year the persecution of Palestinians and Bedouin people who live in the Palestinian Territories have seen an increase in violence and persecution, as there appears to be an increase in the active campaign to drive them from their lands.

While the focus is on Gaza and the destruction of anything that resembles a place to live in that overcrowded space, the gaze on what is occurring on the West Bank is averted… look over there at Gaza, remember October 7, release the hostages, nothing to see here, as villages are attacked, people harassed on a daily basis, security check, arrests for no apparent reason, a constant level of fear and intimidation.

Basic human rights are being denied on an ethnic basis, undesirables are being driven out but have no where to go while the world’s eyes are focussed on Gaza

It seems that the play Fiddler on the Roof is being re-scripted. But no option to convert to Judaism, no offer of resettlement, not even in Australia, a land of immigrants, just go anywhere but here… except where?