Teaching Ethics
My appetite for teaching applied ethics was whetted by the opportunity to conduct a subject for graduate teachers on contemporary moral issues as well as one   about the teaching of values within the new school program on human relationships education. The inauguration of QUT and its School of Humanities in 1990 provided a context for developing a specialised program in ethics which blossomed into one of Australia’s first undergraduate majors in Applied Ethics, supplemented a few years later by post-graduate research degrees and the establishment of a Centre for the Study of Ethics . The   time was right for this initiative. Not only was there a readiness for a focus on values education among the large student body in teacher education, but, in addition, other developments like the establishment of university based nurse education gave our program undoubted viability.  

The start of our ethics teaching program also coincided with reforms to the State’s police service, including the requirement for university based pre-service police education incorporating a compulsory ethics subject. One memory I have of those early classes stems from a lecture in which I was introducing the range of normative theories of ethics. I asked the class, “Why should we be moral?” And received a very straight-forward reply from a female police recruit in the second row: “Because if you’re not, you might get AIDS” – an answer which demonstrated two characteristics of many of the class groups I taught: a narrow, sexually focused understanding of what morality is and the strong tendency to make moral judgments on consequentialist or utilitarian grounds.

The eagerness of students to engage with questions of practical ethics was quite apparent – especially the growing number of mature age undergraduates, and particularly in a curriculum context which was not burdened by some of the linguistic and esoteric examinations of meta-ethics found in a traditional Philosophy Department, nor confused by the cacophony of post-modern voices diluting moral discourse. Indeed many found the topics and approach we were offering liberating, in that they gave them, in a secular context, the opportunity to examine matters of personal and social meaning. In 1996 I converted my introductory subject, Understanding Ethics, into a successful textbook which went to a revised edition a few years later. In addition to producing scholarly articles, I found the popular interest in ethics provided a platform for teaching ethics through numerous short newspaper and magazine articles and eventually a weekly statewide radio talkback show. These experiences confirmed a conviction clear to me since my student days at Boston University, that the human capacity to determine what we can do has outstripped our ability to decide what we ought to do, and that therein lay the urgency and inevitability of a resurgent interest in ethics around the globe. 

At the same time I was under no naïve illusion that that interest of itself would build a better world. Ethics, as I taught it, must always be in harness with a realistic analysis of collective self interest and the abuse of power in human society. I challenged my students and other audiences to be suspicious of the possibility of ethics being used for reactionary, coercive and authoritarian social purposes as promoted by the American moral majority, for instance. Rather I advocated ethics as an instrument of social transformation, rejecting any ethical approach which fails to take seriously, commitment to a reflective, critical and transformative engagement with changing social and technological conditions by aiming to benefit those most disadvantaged in those contexts.  

Given this ideological bias - and no approach is free of bias stated or unstated – my concern in teaching was always to present   my commitments in ways that avoid the charge of indoctrination. I respected the protocols of academia which enjoin teachers to employ evidence based argument. Indeed I developed what I called an “ethic of response”  which sought to be as comprehensive as possible in weighing up (and responding to) all the elements within a moral issue. However, my teaching style did not eschew a place for inspiring or persuading students, but the approach I tried to adopt was along the lines, “This is my conclusion and the reasons for it. What is yours?” 

Of course the question as to whether ethics can be taught at all is not a simple one. The suggestion that ethics is caught not taught, as if it were a virus, contains an important half-truth. The matter of ethics education  is one to which I gave close attention concluding, not surprisingly, that morality is learned essentially in communal relationships like the family or the gang or a religious group or workplace sub-cultures. So I never approached the teaching of ethics as if it were designed to make people good, though I believe studying ethics conveys many potential benefits for students in their lives as a whole, as some graciously and privately confessed to me. Its benefits include greater self-awareness and sensitivity to the ethical dimensions of life, and, further, more capacity to recognize consequences, reflect empathetically, and envision alternatives. 

Our academic initiatives at QUT found resonance in many universities around the country as new courses in ethics emerged during the 1990s. This trend corresponded with a mood in the community worldwide, which was putting ethics on the agenda in health care, business, the professions and public institutions. In Sydney, the formation of the St James Ethics Centre around 1990, with a significant and well established consultancy service reaching senior levels of business and other sections of the Australian community, is a high profile example of this mood in the Australian context. Indeed “ethics” was becoming the flavor of the month and, consequently, a field open to all sorts of players with little formal background in ethics as a scholarly, applied discipline. To mitigate against the likelihood of individual consultants exploiting this trend and the probability that responses in the name of ethics would be shallow and often mere window-dressing, a small group of us , mainly from University contexts, meeting at the University of Newcastle in 1993 acted on the need to form a national body to facilitate networking and to encourage some informal quality control of this emerging practice. We established the Australian Association of Professional and Applied Ethics. I became its second national President in 1995 succeeding Simon Longstaff of the St James Ethics Centre. In part this enthusiasm for ethics was a response to the political fallout of the Watergate affair during the Nixon presidency in the USA, and the “greed is good” decade of the 1980s when the sloppy ethical standards of commerce came under scrutiny. In Queensland this trend was echoed in the Report of Commissioner Tony Fitzgerald into corruption in public life delivered in 1989. That report made the key point that “ethical education must also play a role in long-term solutions to problems”.  

There is no question that my ethics agenda as an academic was shaped by the implementation of ethics and accountability reforms in the Queensland public sector during the 1990s, following the Fitzgerald Inquiry. On a study trip to the USA in 1992 where I met several scholars and visited programs working in administrative ethics and legislative ethics I realized the potential for academic programs in this domain. In the Australian context there was a need and opportunity to construct the discipline of public sector ethics virtually de novo. Few Australian academics – with the exception of Michael Jackson of the University of Sydney and John Uhr of the Australian National University – and even fewer ethicists had ventured into this applied and professional ethics arena. 

My experience in Queensland’s political culture and my interest in political ethics led me to design a subject called “The Just Society” which drew heavily on the liberal democratic vision of the American political philosopher, John Rawls, but was also informed by my earlier mentor, Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr’s insights into the complexities of human society caution on both the need for, and the difficulty of, achieving social justice. They served as something of a corrective to Rawls’ liberal rationalism. 

But it was the unfolding political and administrative reform agenda, not only in Queensland but also in New South Wales and Western Australia, which particularly influenced my career as a researcher and author , providing a backdrop for addressing and organizing several conferences and numerous opportunities for public commentary about public sector ethics. Convincing politicians and bureaucrats of the desirability for a more intentional approach to ethics by legislators and public servants was obviously an uphill task. Still, the opportunity to provide consultancy advice and make submissions in the development of Queensland’s Public Sector Ethics Act 1994 and its later Parliamentary ethics regime opened a way for climbing that mound. In this work I developed a close working partnership with Charles Sampford at Griffith University. On my retirement from QUT in March 2000 I took up a role with that University’s Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance particularly in the design and implementation of a new graduate program focused on public sector ethics. Sampford and I shared a similar outlook when it came to academic projects in applied ethics, namely that their transformative potential depended on working partnerships between what we called “engaged academics” and “reflective practitioners”, a praxis mode of research. 

Challenging Corruption
Sensational events in Queensland politics in the late 1980s produced a cascading crisis which gave renewed energy to those of us who had publicly abhorred the style of the Bjelke-Petersen government for almost two decades. At the zenith of his power after the 1986 state election, the Premier and cabinet ministers like the Liberal Party defector, Don Lane, and “the minister for everything” Russ Hinze , who brazenly dispensed favours with a disregard for integrity and propriety in public office, were only months away from public disgrace. These events were precipitated by the media investigations of The Courier-Mail’s Phil Dickie and Chris Masters of the ABC Four Corners program. Allegations of police corruption at the highest levels involving prostitution caused Acting Premier Bill Gunn (‘acting’ because the Premier was indulging his fantasy called “Joh for PM”) to establish a Commission of Inquiry headed by Tony Fitzgerald, a QC with a track record for taking up causes against the interests of the National Party government, though he told The Sydney Morning Herald he “may have been chosen for the Inquiry because he was notorious for nothing; he had never been interested in politics…”  

The Inquiry began on 20 July 1987 and before its final report was handed down two years later it had claimed many scalps in the political arena and the Police Force including the Premier and the Police Commissioner. On 1 December, 1987, a two minute visit by the Premier to the Queensland Governor ended the Bjelke-Petersen regime. He exited defiantly as The Courier Mail’s editorial  told Queenslanders the next day: “When he went it was the old Joh Queenslanders have come to know – aggressive, unrepentant, blaming everyone but himself, conceding nothing except that he was going.” 

Many of us rejoiced, though we knew there was a long way to go to really change the political climate of Queensland. Predictably, the events triggered by the Fitzgerald Commission became a sub-text to my role at the Kelvin Grove Campus. In fact, by December 1988 as the Fitzgerald hearings wound down, I realized it was time to try to harness the concern of ordinary citizens for a corruption free Queensland. So in response to Fitzgerald’s public warning that Queenslanders would need to remain vigilant lest “the forces of darkness” return, a handful of us formed a non- party political action group, Citizens Against Corruption (CAC). In announcing its formation The Courier-Mail reported my statement on 8 December, 1988:   “We can’t leave the Fitzgerald inquiry, the police or the media to do the job. The people must show some concern, anger and commitment for change. The momentum of the inquiry must be sustained after it concludes this week.” 

The first activity of Citizens Against Corruption was a candle-lit vigil on Human Rights Day (10 December , 1988) in memory of those who had been “the victims of corruption” through the Joh era, people like dead prostitute Shirley Brifman, former Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod, vilified former public servant, John Sinclair and many anonymous citizens who paid a penalty. At the February general meeting of CAC at the Teachers’ Union Building in Spring Hill I concluded my remarks as convenor and chief spokesperson, rallying the supporters for the year ahead: Living in Queensland through the past twenty years has been painful for many of us. Yet some of us have clung to a vision that authoritarianism and exploitation (especially over the ‘little’ ones of society – be they ‘the poor’ or ‘the environment’) need not be the way of the future. At last we begin to feel that history is turning our way. Let us seize this moment and make a contribution to a reformed Queensland.

Again it was time to recall the organizing skills learnt in previous campaigns as a small group of us attempted once more to shift the boundaries of public opinion. This time the task was easier, for the political momentum was with us. This time, for example, the media were very ready to build our profile and spread our message. Though the organizing energy depended to some extent on old stalwarts from PND’s glory days, like Lil Gwyther, unsolicited supporters emerged. CAC’s executive committee contained whistleblowers of no political affiliation and a number of small business people, surprisingly including a vigorous opponent of mine in my previous incarnation as a church social justice spokesman. We were joined by several colourful characters, like Union organizer, whistleblower and cartoonist Kevin Lindeberg, whose unrelenting critique of the destruction of evidence before the aborted Heiner inquiry in 1990 has become legendary. Another was perennial aboriginal litigant John ‘Dungalee’ Jones, a descendant from Fraser Island tribes whose forays into public controversy on accountability matters continue to haunt post-Fitzgerald governments. The impact of Citizens Against Corruption, which eventually had about 300 paid-up members, was enhanced by the involvement of Nigel Powell, a former Licensing Branch detective who assisted journalists Masters and Dickie in their expose stories. Powell had also been a pivotal witness in the early stages of the Fitzgerald Inquiry when the connections between police and prostitution were uncovered. He had strategic nous, a good media presence and a willingness to go the course in the reform agenda that was needed. 

CAC adopted a fourteen point anti-corruption platform which became the basis of a submission to Commissioner Fitzgerald and the political parties. On this list was a fundamental issue: reform of the electoral system including an end to the zonal system and tighter scrutiny of electoral rolls. This was a matter of public importance I first took up in 1973 when I was convenor of the Methodist Church’s Christian Citizenship and it remained, in the view of many of us, one of the keys to shifting Queensland’s political culture, along with the need for a House of Review elected on a proportional voting system, though that was such an unlikely eventuality that it didn’t make it on to the list. Electoral reform was also the core business of Citizens for Democracy (CFD), a group set up some years before when I was on its executive. Its convenor after the Fitzgerald Report was issued was Chris Griffiths, a part-time journalism student and later a well known scribbler on State political affairs for The Courier-Mail. During this period Chris and I were in contact almost daily to ensure co-ordination of the activities of Queensland’s extra-Parliamentary opposition.

Also on the list of CAC’s platform was “further inquiry into (MP) Don Lane’s allegations (before Fitzgerald) of Cabinet misconduct”. Lane, the member for Merthyr, had been forced to step down from Cabinet in 1988 but refused to resign his parliamentary seat. In the early months of 1989 Don Lane became the focus target of CAC’s campaign. T-shirts, not particularly complimentary to Mr Lane and his prominent facial features, were produced. Regular pickets were held outside his electoral office and Brisbane’s newspapers chimed in insistently calling for his resignation. The Sun provided a weekly accounting of Lane’s salary as an MP since he had made his rather lame, probably partial, but damning enough admissions about rorting the system of ministerial expenses to the Fitzgerald Inquiry (and which even Bjelke-Petersen suggested might have been “a bit of a smokescreen to cover himself” for more serious misdemeanours ).   After a couple of months the pressure proved too great and Don Lane’s resignation led to a by-election in Merthyr.

Nigel Powell was keen to run as a candidate in the by-election with CAC support. The CAC executive endorsed this move. So with our limited resources, and they were entirely voluntary, we amateurs in the polling game began to sell our message through weekends of door knocking and street stalls in the leafy and affluent suburbs of Merthyr which had normally returned a conservative MP. We quickly learnt of the swings and roundabouts of electioneering: how to vote signs being defaced or disappearing, the pressure to allocate preferences which in this conservative electorate and because of our desire to maintain independence we declined to do, and the inevitable “Melbourne Cup field” of candidates. Nigel became particularly despondent when he learnt that one who had thrown his hat in the ring as a candidate for the poll was Geraldo Bellino whose unlicensed nightclub business in the Valley had been exposed at the outset of the Fitzgerald Inquiry mainly through Nigel’s testimony. There was also a hiccup when the Minister for Education weighed in with the accusation that resources at the Kelvin Grove CAE were being used for the campaign. My reply was that those of us involved in the campaign from the CAC “put in more than a full week’s work at the college”, but his intervention did ensure that $41.20 was reimbursed for phone and facsimile use. The successful candidate for Merthyr turned out to be the wily operator Santo Santoro, who commenced his career as a Liberal politician on that by-election day. Idealist as he was, Nigel really believed that disenchantment with the major parties in a by-election context might get him across the line. As it turned out he scored a fairly respectable 8% of the primary vote, ahead of all four other independents. Nonetheless, by taking our message to the electors in Merthyr and beyond, we achieved our goal of contributing to the momentum which would make more likely the reform of Queensland’s political and criminal justice system. 

After the Fitzgerald Report was released in July 1989 our efforts in CAC were devoted to calling for its implementation and the more subtle question of who could be trusted with that task. To this end there were several rallies and pickets at Parliament House. During   one we carried brown paper bags as symbols of corrupt payments to politicians and during another, in conjunction with several other extra-parliamentary opposition groups, we formed a human chain of democracy encircling the Parliament. 

Fitzgerald had recommended the abolition of the Police Special branch. I also wrote to the new and untainted Police Commissioner imported from Victoria, Noel Newnham, on behalf of CAC about what was proposed regarding the continuation or disposal of files of what was believed to be Queensland’s notorious political thought-police. I also made inquiries about the file I suspected bore my name. Newnham replied on 24 November 1989 that he was concerned about the functions of the Special Branch and that with Chairman designate of the Criminal Justice Commission, Sir Max Bingham, he was reviewing its holdings adding:

There is no file in your name at the Branch. I have no way of guaranteeing that your name does not appear in other files dealing with topics that you have been interested in, but there is an ongoing culling programme aimed at reducing the amount of irrelevant material; there is no index card bearing your name and therefore you will understand that I have no way of accessing in the manual system precisely where reference might be made to yourself. 

Perhaps I should have replied asking for file information about AWD, Concerned Christians, PND or CAC but I chose to let the matter go. I admit there would have been some personal satisfaction in seeing first-hand how Queensland’s own spooks had portrayed me as a figment of their fictions. But I was delighted to see the Special Branch go. Beyond partisan politics it had served no real purpose, though it had disrupted and damaged many lives. 

When the 1989 election was finally called by Russell Cooper, Mike Ahern’s National Party replacement, I argued that the time had come when CAC should abandon its “independent” status and actively seek the election of an ALP government. At this point some of our supporters fell by the wayside. Within our modest resources the best we could do was to campaign in two Brisbane seats supporting ALP candidates we felt had credibility as reformers and in electorates which had to be won from the outgoing government if Wayne Goss was to become the first Labor Premier for thirty two years. CAC’s letter box campaign, which called on electors to “vote for change”, in effect supporting Matt Foley in Yeronga and Jim Fouras in Ashgrove, drew the animosity of Liberal leader, Angus Innes, a man of true integrity, but leader of a party which, as I pointed out to him in a phone call, disqualified itself as a choice for change while it directed its preferences to the disgraced Nationals. In 1990 Citizens Against Corruption disbanded, passing on its baton, or what was left of it, to Citizens for Democracy, a body better equipped to scrutinize the electoral and administrative reforms.

Turning Queensland Around
By 1989 it was clear that the boundaries of Queensland’s politics had shifted. Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s record term as Premier was well finished. There were those who might defend his record as an initiator of economic development in the State, though it might also be said that even in this domain his Premiership lacked innovation and foresight, merely perpetuating the ‘resourcism’ which made Queensland a ‘quarry’ state. In any case the boundaries had so shifted on other fronts that when he and some of his colleagues eventually reached the end of the political line, they were anachronisms. When it came to social policy, education, concern for the environment, human rights and probity in government the Bjelke-Petersen government was bankrupt. On the most beneficent reading, the best that could be said on the probity question is, “Bjelke-Petersen chose to ignore corruption because to acknowledge it was to hand a weapon to his political enemies” (to quote one of his biographers)  . Though the citation for his knighthood granted on the Queen’s birthday in 1984 dissemblingly praised his “improvements to the parliamentary process”, on the matter of parliamentary democracy, another biographer  understates the situation, “The parliamentary institution suffered in Queensland during Bjelke-Petersen’s tenure of office.” However, when Sir Joh stood trial for perjury after his testimony before Fitzgerald, I took little notice. Though he was found ‘not guilty’ in dubious circumstances, I had no interest or energy to agitate about that . The boundaries had shifted. It was time to move on.
 
Tony Fitzgerald’s carefully managed inquiry had been the catalyst for shifting the boundaries. Through the media coverage to the Inquiry’s 238 days of hearings, the general public was exposed to evidence about corruption and shady dealings at the highest levels of Queensland’s government. Inevitably the impact was huge, generating a discourse about accountability and due process in government that had seemed light years away when we campaigned for the right to march in the 1970s. Commissioner Fitzgerald’s Report opened the way for prosecutions and very specifically prescribed reforms for the police force. However, he left the substantial agenda of reform to the two Commissions recommended, the Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) and the Electoral and Administrative Review Commission (EARC). 

Release of the Fitzgerald Report was something of a major rite of passage for Queensland. On 3 July 1989 at the Queensland Exhibition Buildings the stakeholders including CAC collected copies of the Fitzgerald “bible” which Premier Ahern had promised to implement rather literally, “lock, stock and barrel”. Perusing this holy writ I was overwhelmed with a sense that Queenslanders like me owe a huge debt to Tony Fitzgerald. I never met the man personally until 1994 when he launched one of my books at Parliament House during his time as President of Queensland’s Court of Appeal. While holding that office and, until he resigned as Chair of the Litigation Reform Commission, Tony Fitzgerald’s attempts to reform the judicial system were obstructed. At the end of 1997, the then Chief Justice of Queensland retired. Fitzgerald was, predictably, passed over by the National/Liberal coalition during its short tenure. When as then Leader of the Opposition, Peter Beattie made the political judgment to endorse that decision Fitzgerald also retired and took his judicial talents to New South Wales. I have talked with him several times in the past decade, trusting his counsel on some occasions and   seeing at close hand his deep commitment to social justice. I have also perceived in him a certain shyness bordering on self-doubt which sometimes recoils from public demands, characteristics probably related to professional and family suffering in the years since his history making Commission. His instinct for doubt ensured that his famous Report included a prescient note of warning about “the vested interests which will avoid and subvert real reform while creating a new, attractive but hollow façade to hide the continuing misuse of power and misconduct.” 

Implicit in that warning was a hint that even “the goodies” are prone to the seduction of evil, and that unchecked power will corrupt anyone. After the release of Fitzgerald’s Report I wrote a piece called “Turning Queensland around: the agenda beyond corruption, a reflection on repentance”  in which I reflected that the Fitzgerald process was inviting Queenslanders and their leaders in public life to a profound ethical change. I emphasised that though there is the temptation for those of us who were long-term critics to say “We told you so”, critics should remember the pitfalls of self-righteousness in politics as well as remaining mindful of the moral limitations of political practice. 

Nonetheless, I rejoiced when on 2 December, 1989 the ALP under Wayne Goss defeated the National Party government. Dancing through Queen Street Mall that night I remember saying to Coralie rather revealingly, “I can now die happy.” Granted, my vision was being blurred by imagining a “light on the hill”. I would soon be asking whether that beacon was shining for the new government? Would we ever turn Queensland around? Sure, we could reach the point where Queensland is no longer the butt of southern jokes, but what would it take to cultivate a vibrant democracy with a determined commitment to social justice? 

My euphoria was tempered by an anarchist friend I met on election night in the Mall who pointedly posed the dilemma confronting those who were formed by the politics of opposition during National Party rule: “I love the defeat. I’m not sure about the victory.” An hour later, at yet another victory party, I found myself, probably rather inappropriately, suggesting to a very weary future Goss Cabinet minister: “The real challenge is to transform Queensland’s culture.” 

And, as always, I cherished silently a hope that I might play a role in addressing that challenge.

Chapter Seven
 TRANSFORMING POLITICAL BOUNDARIES

The Oxymoron of Political Ethics
Perhaps the words of Machiavelli, that medieval observer of politics’ limitations, should have been embossed on the covers of the historic Report Tony Fitzgerald handed to Premier Ahern, for they anticipate the hazards confronting those tasked with reshaping Queensland’s political culture: 

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new .

The problems uncovered by Commissioner Fitzgerald were essentially ethical, even though they required legal, administrative and political remedies. Over decades, Queensland’s political culture had degraded the normative core of democratic government, which is that public office should not be exploited for private gain. Between the lines, Fitzgerald’s Report reminded us that it is for good reason that the term, “public service” is applied to the role of politicians, police, bureaucrats, judges and so on. After all, as one student  of public life expressed it: government officials are “citizens in lieu of the rest of us” whose specialty is to serve “the common good”. So it is that, ever since Aristotle articulated the symbiotic relationship between ethics and politics, politics has been regarded as a noble art, in textbooks at least. Yet again and again the practice of public life and politics seems to give the lie to this view, breeding the cynicism reflected in polls which judge politicians to be about as trustworthy as used car salespersons, and fostering the suggestion that episodes of Yes Minister are  in fact documentaries not situation comedies. Nevertheless, after Fitzgerald, there was no other prospect but to entrust reform to the politicians and the instrumentalities of government, augmented by the CJC and EARC, within the rather unreliable court of democratic public opinion. 

In fact “the new order of things” was designed during the tenure of Wayne Goss and, to a significant extent, implemented. So I was rather intrigued, but certainly not surprised, when, not long after he was replaced by Rob Borbidge as Premier, Wayne Goss told me in answer to a question  I asked him, “Politics is a morally ambiguous activity”. Goss’ comment pithily names what I first learnt from Reinhold Niebuhr who referred to politics as “an area where conscience and power meet, where the ethical and coercive factors of human life will interpenetrate, and work out their tentative and uneasy compromises.” 

Unfortunately, many citizens and some politicians regard the idea of “political ethics” as an uneasy conjunction, if not an oxymoron. For my part I refused to accept a boundary between politics and ethics. Whether or how there can be some practical engagement between ethics and politics – in terms of both governmental processes and conduct as well as at the level of policy – has been the cornerstone question driving my public and academic activity.  The very moral ambiguity to which Wayne Goss referred makes that engagement both necessary and difficult. Understandably, many politicians and senior bureaucrats are suspicious of the “ethics thing”. They see it as setting traps to catch them out; they distrust ethicists and those who employ their categories, questioning whether these “outsiders” understand the constraints of practical politics and government. In my experience, only a minority of political practitioners appreciate how ethical advice and the instruments of transparency, like Registers of Pecuniary Interests, can serve as protective and supportive measures in the risky waters of public life.  

At the same time the general public is often too ready to make ethical judgments about political players with insufficient regard for the pressures that impact on them. One unfortunate spin-off from the widespread public disdain regarding standards in political practice is that ethical misdemeanors rarely hurt political parties at the polls. The general, but invalid, perception is that “they all do it”; all parties are guilty, it is concluded, so there is no basis in ethical conduct on which to prefer either side. Though there is a certain inevitability about “dirty hands” (to use the image frequently invoked by political philosophers) being found among those who govern, that does not mean that politics is irredeemable or amoral. Because it requires “the art of compromise”, politics is often regarded ipso facto as unethical. Still, there is nothing intrinsically immoral in employing compromise, providing it does not emerge from a blatant disregard for principle. Indeed, as an art, political compromise invariably demands ethical decision-making skills. 

Again and again I have encountered the mistaken view, current in the public at large and held (perhaps conveniently) by some political practitioners, that politics is unremittingly pragmatic, a product of the realm of pure power while ethics is unceasingly idealistic, a derivative of the realm of pure principle alone. Neither view of politics or ethics is accurate or acceptable. In fact, both should share a quest for the best possible in an imperfect world. Through politics we may aim to approximate the ethical objective of the common good, and through ethics we may keep sensitivity to that objective alive in the body politic. Providing leadership and guidance to that end was what I offered and promoted, in conjunction with others, in the early days of the Goss government. 

It was the desire to contribute that misguidedly decided me to put my hat in the ring for two positions in government . Mercifully, I was unsuccessful. However, out of the blue, I was appointed to the Queensland Community Corrections Board (QCCB) in 1990, which I served as a part-time community member for four years at a time when there was some reforming energy in a prison system that is prone to gross injustice. From that vantage I felt partly co-opted to the bureaucracy but I also met some remarkable Queenslanders through the experience, most notably former Supreme Court judge and subsequently Chair of the Corrections Board, Bill Carter QC, whose insights on the shortcomings of the criminal justice system have influenced me repeatedly. 

On the QCCB we were privy to the criminal histories and personal background of hundreds of prisoners who were serving terms of five years or more, and we visited the prisons on occasion meeting some of those seeking release into community supervision from our Board. The cases we encountered included men who had committed the most heinous of crimes but, though there were exceptions, the overall impact of the stories in the mountains of files I read in that period was a real sadness at how neglect, disadvantage and violation escalate to a point which creates distorted human beings who  are then virtually thrown on the scrap heap of society.(Ten years after I withdrew from the Board I returned to these issues as Director of the Unitingcare Centre for Social Justice in 2004 and was angered to learn how many of the reforms gained in the early 1990s, especially in the area of Community Corrections, had virtually disappeared.) 

Soon after my appointment to the QCCB I made a better decision than my flirtation with the prospect of employment in the new State government. That was to marry my friend and soul-mate of many years Coralie Kingston in a ceremony at St Mary’s South Brisbane on 5 August, 1990. The celebrant for the happy occasion with friends and family was John Woodley who was authorized to marry “according to the rites of the Uniting Church”; apparently, the unorthodoxy of the occasion later prompted the Catholic Archbishop to express his displeasure to our friend, Father Peter Kennedy, the priest in charge of St Mary’s. 

Within two months of our marriage I was struck by the fragility of life, for I experienced symptoms which resulted in a series of tests culminating in a colonoscopy. As I lay on the table designed for this test emerging rather euphorically from the mild anaesthesia which accompanies the procedure, my gasterontologist told me that he had found the trouble, a tumor in the bowel. Forty-eight hours later the malignancy had been surgically removed. 

I had entered the land of uncertainty, the world of “oncology”, a term I had never heard or understood before those critical days in December 1990. But then, there was much about my body and my inner self and relationships that I was to learn rapidly in my recovery. My marriage to Coralie, barely begun, took on intensified significance.  My body, it seemed, was inviting me to a quest beyond ethics and politics which involved the search for a more integrated way of living that was true both to public challenges and my personal needs, an experience I explain in the next chapter  The journey with cancer was to be more than a footnote to my life, for though the bowel cancer never metastasised, cancer’s shadowy presence remained and renewed after two further surgeries in 1999, for a malignant prostate and to remove a kidney endangered by a cancerous growth.   

Academic life resumed later in 1991. As for my relationship with government, it became clear that, though I was less an outsider than I had been under the National Party regime, my role remained on the boundary of politics as a public commentator and researcher  trying to educate public opinion and, when opportunity arose, as an occasional adviser to government. In retrospect, I see how the role of external ethics provocateur was essential if the Fitzgerald process was to yield outcomes which transformed politics in Queensland.

However, the challenge broadened through the 1990s. Ethics in Queensland politics meant much more than “keeping the Fitzgerald spirit alive”, concentrating on probity in government, examining the personal behaviour of politicians or keeping at bay the cancer of corruption in the body politic. After all, good government is more than clean government. The reinvention of government in a post-modern world, shaped by an increasingly globalised culture and economy, demanded a reappraisal of public life as an ethical vocation, not only among those institutions and officials who depend on the public treasury but in the market place generally. Reforming public administration in Queensland was but a prelude to a much needed public conversation about the kind of communal, cultural and socio-economic society we want our liberal democracy to provide. Moreover, if the ethics business was truly committed to “transforming politics” there was an urgent need to raise additional ethical questions about the substance of policy, about matters of social justice, which a preoccupation with public sector ethics alone did not necessarily promote. Such questions pointed to a state of affairs with which I was increasingly uneasy, and about which there seemed little awareness in the ranks of Queensland’s political elite. That said, the reforms spawned post-Fitzgerald were consistent with my social democratic political philosophy inasmuch as they valued and sought to strengthen the capacity and reputation of the public sector, and that is  a pre-requisite not just for good government but for government that serves the common good. 

Codifying Reform
Over a five year period the Electoral and Administrative Review Commission, in conjunction with the Parliamentary Committee on Electoral and Administrative Review (PCEAR), delivered reports designed to guarantee freedom of information, judicial review, the right to public protest, improved scrutiny in the drafting of new laws, proper public sector audits, whistleblower protection and an ethics code for public officials. While the EARC machinery was in operation, its constant public hearings across the state provided no end of opportunity for the committed few to make written submissions.  It was impossible to keep up with it all. However, I knew one zealot  who attended every day of the Fitzgerald Commission and was later relieved of his withdrawal symptoms after Fitzgerald’s commission ceased by the opportunity to attend seemingly endless CJC, PCJC, EARC and PCEAR public hearings. Altogether the EARC process represented an unbelievable flowering of democracy which was doomed to be seasonal, for EARC was terminated in the second term of the Goss government. At the other end of town, the Criminal Justice Commission was making life uncomfortable for some police, criminals and even politicians, a number of whom resented this “new kid on the block” of Queensland’s governing institutions. Meanwhile, the shake up and shake out in the Queensland public service proceeded apace under new centralized and somewhat authoritarian agencies of Queensland government, the Public Sector Management Commission (PSMC) and the Office of Cabinet, delivering a new order which now included anti-discrimination and equal employment opportunity legislation. 

Within EARC’s sweeping agenda my attention was focused on Tony Fitzgerald’s recommendation for reviewing the skimpy, superficial and ineffective Code of Conduct for Public Officials hastily introduced by Premier Ahern. The redesign of the code was the opportunity, I believed, for promoting some fundamental ethics awareness which could impact on public life in Queensland. This was also an arena in which my expertise might make a difference, so I developed a collaborative relationship with Howard Whitton, the public servant co-opted from Canberra by Tom Sherman, Chair of EARC, to assist in the development of the Commission’s Report on a Code for Public Officials. Eventually, as it transpired, Whitton became the officer within the PSMC who guided the Code process into legislation. 

One of my first moves was to pursue an extensive research study within the Queensland public service into “Expectations of Public Sector Managers towards Ethics Education in the Public Sector” . I saw this research as both contributing to an environment in which the Government might introduce a worthwhile program, and, in addition, providing data which would assist those of us who saw a potential opportunity to service ethics education initiatives. 

The Queensland EARC Report on a Code for Public Officials subsequently proved to be highly influential in other jurisdictions. The process generated by the Report was part of what some, mindful of the seemingly omnipresent interest in professional codes of ethics, facetiously nominated as “the code-of-conduct led recovery”. In fact the drafting and implementation of what became Queensland’s Public Sector Ethics Act 1994 coincided with similar initiatives in Western Australia after the WA Inc. Inquiry (as the Royal Commission into Commercial Activities of Government and Other Matters became known) and in New South Wales where momentum for ethics and anti-corruption programs in that state’s public sector was generated largely by the impact of the high-powered Independent Commission Against Corruption. Howard Whitton and I were drawn in various ways into this evolving public sector ethics movement. Internationally, New Zealand’s Public Service Commission, the Office of Government Ethics in Washington, Ottawa’s Ethics Counselor and Lord Nolan’s Inquiry into Ethical Standards in Public Life following so called ‘sleaze’ scandals in Britain, became part of a growing and functioning network giving practical knowledge to this sub-discipline of applied and professional ethics which I was trying to foster from a Queensland base with the particular support of Charles Sampford at Griffith University. 

The global pattern, reflected in Queensland, is that ethics reform in government is generally triggered by scandal initiating a public review of standards. However, the desirability of instituting an ethics regime for public officials is grounded in a more fundamental shift in the role of government within modern economies, and parallels changes in the nature of the public service, including much greater movement of officials between the private and public sector. Certainly in governments within the Westminster tradition, this change in the ethos of the public sphere has meant a partial loss of the institutional memory of public service ethics. These factors, together with more diversity in community ethical standards, provided a strong case for explicit standard setting and proper induction into, and monitoring of, the standards. 

One of the problematic aspects of Queensland’s attempt to build a public sector ethics regime was that the Code of Conduct initiative came relatively late in the reform process, after other ethics- related administrative law measures and the influential CJC, including its Corruption Prevention Division, were already in place. The Code of Conduct exercise also came at a time when the public service and its departments were rather weary and wary of yet another reform program. This was a concern I voiced at the time as I made the case in private meetings, at conferences, in academic papers and in submissions. I maintained that developing a Code was not sufficient, for it was but one piece in a more comprehensive process that must be essentially educative, addressing in an ongoing way the need to nurture an ethical culture in the public service. Furthermore, there was a real and dangerous prospect that this exercise would become just another tool of managerial control.  From another angle, I conceded that the preoccupation with ethics may disrupt good government – a view doubtless shared by those MPs caught up in the 1991 CJC findings about misuse of their travel entitlements. 

However, I was more concerned that mere lip service to moral pieties by government could highlight double standards which would discredit the ethics exercise. Certainly we had to keep our approach in tune with the realities of government. In many ways the ideas Howard Whitton and I were promoting were not only novel, they were also alien to some of those who needed convincing. There were others who could not come to terms with the domain of normative guidelines which, on the one hand, wished to avoid legislating morality but, on the other hand, insisted that there was substance in the idea of public officials employing ethical decision-making strategies. A central concept to our message was an explication of the role and responsibilities of public officials, thereby, for instance, clarifying the muddy waters around managing conflicts of interest, an art conveniently forgotten in the political culture exemplified by previous minister Russell Hinze who saw no problem with his “convergent interests” (even if they included running a Real Estate business from his electoral office).  

In the end, the ethics program endorsed by the Goss Government was less rigorous than the original EARC recommendations. The program centred around the Public Sector Ethics Act and its five values, which were socialized into departments via a second tier of agency specific Codes of Conduct derived from these principles. While the Act named the requirement on ethics education and training, the government did not adopt the EARC and PCEAR supported proposal for a well-resourced and independent Office of Public Sector Ethics. Ambivalence and tokenism in these matters was evident from the outset and certainly there were senior government officials who outspokenly declared they would resist the development of “an ethics industry” of which presumably I was both a leading advocate and potential beneficiary. Certainly, flirtations with the prospect of significant consultancy roles opening up as the Act was implemented quickly came to nought. Nonetheless the development of codes with associated training programs proceeded over the next few years, no doubt making a difference in many places. However, I believe the Goss Government missed an opportunity. Effectively, in a culture where economic rationalism won the day and bullying remained a feature of the workplace the approach adopted was clear – ethics matters but it is certainly not trumps, other considerations may matter more. 

Another of EARC’s projects particularly interested me - the investigation of Queensland’s iniquitous and long standing gerrymandered electoral laws which corrupted the democratic process at its roots. In my submission to EARC I not only took the opportunity to argue for the end of a zonal system which perverted the “one vote, one value” principle but, somewhat hopefully, I pleaded the case for a proportional system of election, similar to Tasmania’s Hare-Clark mechanism, proposing a Parliament of 91 MPs elected in 13 equal constituencies of 7 members each. In a word my contention was that such a system was the most democratic and practical option, which compensated for the deficiency in Queensland of not having a House of Review like the Australian Senate. This system possesses the virtue of largely eliminating the potential for manipulation of the electoral system by the major parties, the inclination which had produced the gerrymander in the first place. My proposal was practical in the sense that it involved virtually no increase in the number of politicians. Clearly my plea did not sway the pragmatic impulse of EARC’s eminent panel which included Professor Colin Hughes, a former Commonwealth Electoral Commissioner. Nonetheless, EARC did improve the situation enormously, most particularly by depoliticizing electoral redistributions through an independent Electoral Commission, but they preserved the zonal system in a minimal way by maintaining a handful of remote electorates that benefited by weighting. My submission did converge with their findings on one considerable point. They agreed that voters should have the option to take their preferences on the ballot paper as far as, but no further than, they wished. 

While a balance of factors must be considered in developing an electoral system, I still believe that there is merit in my suggestion, especially as Queensland will never embrace the House of Review concept. The merit consists in the likely outcome that it would prevent executive government from abusing the legislature and using it merely as a rubber stamp, which is the Queensland tradition. As Hansard records again and again, this practice was a long term characteristic of government’s treatment of the legislature in Queensland. Indeed, as member for Townsville, my grandfather Green had long ago complained about this matter in the Legislative Assembly during the adjournment debate on 27 October 1921. One objection to my submission on electoral reform is that it could lead to minority government, even though this was an outcome which resulted from the defeat of the Goss government in 1996. In that case the “perils” of minority government were negotiated, certainly without a constitutional crisis, and arguably with some benefits (especially in the way Parliament operated) . In any event, an electoral reform which can produce majorities of forty-three and thirty seven seats in an eighty-nine seat Parliament, as happened for the Beattie government at the 2004 and 2001 elections is hardly a recipe for the nurturance of democracy! From my perspective, I also confess a certain sympathy with the observation the former outspoken federal independent MP, Ted Mack gave me in a research interview in 1995, that one of the major reasons for ethical malaise in the Australian political system is the adversarial two-party system – though, as I told him, it does not follow that a swag of independents will necessarily enhance political integrity.

Notwithstanding the ongoing limitations of Queensland’s electoral system, the State Parliament has certainly not been immune from the reform process. For instance, Parliament House itself has become a more friendly venue for the electors, not just the elected, since the occasions when citizens were traduced in the chamber without any citizens right of reply. Before 1988 the parliamentary committee system was pretty much of the ‘in house’ variety - the library committee, the standing orders committee and the like. Premier Ahern set out to change that but it was under proposals from EARC that the Parliament moved to a comprehensive and rigorous committee system. 

One of the innovations of The Parliamentary Committees Act 1995 was the establishment of the Members’ Ethics and Parliamentary Privileges Committee (MEPP), charged with “recommending to the Legislative Assembly a proposed code of conduct for members (other than members in their capacity as ministers)”. Six years elapsed before a Code was finally accepted by the legislature – six years during which I made it a sacred duty to regularly and publicly complain about the delay. In that time I consulted closely with successive chairs of the MEPP and their research staff (led by Neil Laurie, later Clerk of the Parliament), all of whom impressed me with their commitment and developing expertise in the area now called “legislative ethics”.

The inaugural chair of the Committee was the member for Bundaberg, Clem Campbell, a gentleman I had never met previous to his appointment. Following my vocal and public promotion of the view that, since there was now a Code of Ethics for unelected officials, it was imperative that there be one for Queensland’s elected officials, I phoned Mr Campbell on the day of his appointment, and that night shared dinner with him in the Parliamentary Dining Room. That meeting began a working relationship and friendship which has extended beyond his days as a parliamentarian.

I well recall how on that first date in the Strangers’ Dining Room with Clem Campbell, with MP colleague Henry Palaszczuk at his side, he went out of his way to emphasise how he regarded his role as chair of the MEPP as primarily to “protect the rights of members”. He was sending me a not so subtle message about the bottom line for any discussion over the need for an MPs code and associated measures  – a theme I was to hear in varied forms from politicians around Australia as I pursued this matter: “Members of Parliament have a special job with special privileges; we are largely misunderstood and misrepresented by the media; we cannot do our job if we are  trammeled with ethics regulations in the same way as other professions, and,  anyway, the few politicians who are crooked will not be caught by devices like Codes”.  

That night I determined – with foolhardy temerity perhaps – that the study and advocacy of legislative ethics would become my major task as an engaged academic. Very little research into Australian parliamentarians’ attitudes to ethical issues had been done, so I sought out an interested colleague, Dr Rodney Smith then of the University of New South Wales. I also began to communicate with Maureen Mancuso, a Canadian scholar who had written The Ethical World of British MPs. 

By early 1996 I had a project underway. Based on 60 hours of recorded discussions with MPs and parliamentary officials in Canberra, New South Wales and Queensland, the centerpiece of the study was 18 in depth interviews with Queensland members. I discovered that across these differing jurisdictions most parliamentarians were thoughtfully concerned to pursue their role ethically, though there was great diversity of opinion among MPs, regardless of their political persuasion, on the hypothetical scenarios I put to them. Nonetheless they broadly agreed to the need for a code, even though their reasoning was mainly to allay adverse public perceptions; they also concurred that ethics education around the code was needed. Though there were wider objectives to my research, one of my aims was to provide feedback to Queensland’s MEPP as it prepared its own Report, while another more optimistic goal was to provoke further consideration of these matters across the parliament. 

This research finally issued in a published collection, Ethics and political practice , which addresses the complex questions around institutionalizing ethics in our parliaments, featuring not only contributions by ethicists and political scientists, but also practitioners including Meredith Burgmann MLC who led the development of an ethics regime in the New South Wales legislature, Howard Wilson, Ethics Counselor to the Canadian Prime Minister and former Federal MP and Governor-General,  Bill Hayden. Hayden had invited me to visit him at Yarralumla some years earlier. I was not able to take up the opportunity until the last year of his term as Governor General and I went with the authority to invite him to become an Adjunct Professor in the QUT School of Humanities. His term at QUT gave me the opportunity to joust with him over our differences of approach to this topic. Hayden’s hostility to a parliamentary ethics regime was influenced by the American legislative experience where political ethics seems over-regulated to some, reaching “the point where we are trying to take the politics out of politicians, like puritans rooting out sin.”  

Legislative ethics, and the question of a Code for MPs, received attention throughout the nineties in most Australian parliaments, with very little result. Overall, half-hearted inquiries, especially in the Federal sphere where there is still no Parliamentary ethics committee, resulted in a saga of avoidance, delay, resistance and uncertainty stemming from a lack of leadership on the desirability of building more intentional ethics mechanisms into political practice . And yet around the nation a range of advocates called for ethical standards for MPs to be codified. The Catholic Bishops of Australia issued a paper, authored by the eminent political scientist from the Australian National University, John Warhurst, which made the case. 

The matter was so topical that it was the theme of the 1997 Australian Study of Parliament Group conference held in the Parliament of Western Australia and attended by Clem Campbell and Marc Rowell, Queensland MPs representing the MEPP. I addressed the conference  arguing that codes were not enough and that the availability of advice and education in interpreting the code in practical situations was essential. But it was my attempt to deal with the thorny question of what content should go into these codes that seemingly made its mark back in Queensland, for it is one thing to agree that MPs should adopt a code of ethics but it is another to agree on what it might helpfully say. New South Wales and Tasmania had approved short and chiefly aspirational codes. I suggested an approach which combined aspirational principles such as “The primacy of the public interest” or “The integrity of the parliament” with a consolidated compilation of existing  and proposed obligations of MPs which are in effect ethically derived, that is, standing orders about declaring conflicts of interest, pecuniary entitlements and disclosures, electoral law requirements  and so on. The Code of Ethical Standards adopted in 2001 by the Queensland Legislative Assembly followed this pattern. Introducing the Code to the House the Premier kindly acknowledged my interest and influence in the process of its development. In my view this Queensland Parliamentary Code sets the benchmark among Australian parliaments for it is a substantial, manual-like resource for advising and educating MPs about their ethical responsibilities, and, moreover, to date it has been well used in this manner under the guidance of the MEPP. 

The Premier’s Ethics Adviser
Peter Beattie  and I had crossed paths several times since the early 1980s when he became ALP reform leader, Denis Murphy’s hand-picked Secretary for the Queensland Branch. I always admired Beattie’s candour and sensed I shared a fair degree of congruence with his social values. When he became an MP with the incoming Goss government he became Chair of the Parliamentary CJC Committee, a function which gave me an opportunity to assess his approach to matters of public sector ethics. His readiness to defend the CJC with an independent spirit that alienated him from key members of the government impressed me, as did the fact that one night as I sat in the parliamentary public gallery in 1994 I noticed Peter Beattie in the chamber reading Ethics for the Public Sector, my text launched that day at Parliament House by Justice Tony Fitzgerald. With others I was delighted when Beattie finally became a Cabinet minister after the Goss Government’s narrow victory at the 1995 polls.

I was able to communicate that delight to him directly on the day he was promoted to Cabinet. While I was standing at the elevators in Education House Beattie appeared with his good ally, Wendy Edmonds, the member for Mt Cootha and Bob Dolan, the member for Maryborough, on their way out of the building after a meeting with Peter Beattie’s close ministerial friend, David Hamill, where perhaps they had been contemplating a crystal ball which presaged the twists and turns of Queensland politics. Uncharacteristically, Peter was desperate to avoid the waiting media who, no doubt, were keen to explore how, as a member of Cabinet, he now saw his fortunes in relation to his political rival, Wayne Goss. With opportunism any politician would be proud of, the future Premier seized on me standing at the elevators for he realized I may be able to provide an escape via my car in the underground car park at Education House. Obligingly I drove the media fugitives in my Toyota Camry down George Street to the gates of Parliament House expressing my hopes to him directly that his Cabinet ascension might brighten “the light on the hill”, and that the Premiership might just be around the corner. 

A few weeks after Peter Beattie became Premier in 1998 I received a call from his Chief of Staff, Rob Whiddon, arranging for me to meet the Premier and to be briefed by Dr Glyn Davis, Director-General of the Department of Premier and Cabinet. The request was for me to review the Premier’s pecuniary interests and to advise him regarding the appropriateness of his personal and family interests, especially in respect of potential conflicts. Glyn Davis told me he regarded the matter as a private arrangement (as opposed to a government one) between the Premier and me.  I undertook the brief with a seriousness which required that I explore with financial institutions the nature of certain investments. My confidential written advice contained a few recommendations to the Premier as to how he might  adjust his affairs and affiliations. Not long after, the Premier announced to the press and subsequently on a couple of occasions to the Parliament that he had sought my advice, nominating that, as a result, he had sold Telstra shares at some cost to his family. From that time, for about two years, despite my endeavours to clarify the situation, I was dubbed in the public arena as the Premier’s ethics adviser, a fact which the Premier seemingly never publicly disavowed. 

In fact, when he spoke to me about reviewing his pecuniary interests the Premier indicated that he had written to all his Cabinet colleagues (some of whom he said were “cowboys”) suggesting that they should follow his example. As it transpired I never heard from any of them. I guess I should have realized that to a few of the Beattie cabinet, I suspect some of the more senior of them, I was a doubtful quantity and, furthermore, to many of them this ethics business is an irrelevant distraction. There is another explanation why others in Cabinet bypassed the opportunity for an ethical review of their interests, an explanation which the Premier subsequently indicated to me, namely, that most of them didn’t have interests worth examining. 

There were times when the Government’s integrity was under fire, placing me in an awkward situation with this de facto role. In one instance during the Net Bet affair I told the media that I thought Treasurer Hamill needed to stand aside while the Auditor-General prepared a report on the relationship between the Treasurer and the action of certain ALP members who had lobbied the Treasurer on behalf of an online gambling company with which the MPs were associated. The following morning I was horrified when I opened my Courier Mail to find that Opposition Leader Rob Borbidge was citing my opinion on the newspaper’s front page and labeling me “the Labor Party’s conscience”. Though the Opposition Leader was wide of the mark, the source of my horror was contemplating the months of sleepless nights that would result if one were the conscience of the Queensland ALP. 

On a later occasion when Minister Robert Schwarten attracted publicity because of a public incident of fisticuffs followed by allegations of political interference in a police investigation I communicated my view privately through the Premier’s Chief of Staff that I thought the Premier should take action in the Schwarten case, or at least review  the Ministerial Code. Again the Opposition were determined to drag me into their public attacks on the Government. David Watson, the Leader of the Liberal Party came out swinging in the Schwarten matter. He issued a press release on 22 May, 2000 headed, “Preston must resign as Beattie conscience…ethics adviser king-hit by Schwarten cover-up”. I am not sure what David Watson really thought of my capacity as an ethics adviser though, as he reminded me several times, he had been the beneficiary of my pragmatic style of ethical judgment forty years earlier. As Knox House Captain at Brisbane Boys’ College I once saved him from a caning when I made a unilateral and utilitarian decision to subvert the authority of a schoolmaster for whom the young Watson was waiting, by telling him that I would deal with the teacher while he should get on to the football oval to represent our House in an all important Inter-House contest. 

Public criticism of the Premier’s action in turning to me for advice came from other directions as well. One fellow academic (Dr William de Maria) who had ongoing public differences with the ethics reforms with which I was associated rather extravagantly compared “the Premier’s engagement of a professional ethicist (who by no coincidence is a minister of religion)” with Henry VIII’s employment of Cardinal Wolsey to extract him from an ethical quagmire . In his satirical Courier-Mail column Peter Wear  took the Premier to task for “outsourcing his conscience”, albeit with the kind qualification that “Noel Preston is as fine and honest a judge of conflicts of interest as one could wish”. Wear then made the pertinent point that a better arrangement would be a proper system within government of advice and scrutiny of the interests of all Cabinet ministers.

Peter Wear’s insistence on a more systemic approach to ethics advice at the heart of government was similar to a policy promise of the incoming Beattie Government that it would appoint an Integrity Commissioner. I had been promoting the idea of prior advice on ethical matters from an independent source. The case for such advice is that it is an eminently sensible, protective instrument for political practitioners, and has been adopted in many jurisdictions in North America and the United Kingdom. The prior nature of advice is the critical element, a conclusion reinforced in my informal experience of public officials who occasionally sought my advice “off the record”. Nonetheless, advice after the event can sometimes be helpful to get elected officials “off the hook”. I experienced this with Brisbane’s Lord Mayor, Jim Soorley. Soorley had created a furore in the months before his retirement in 2003 by announcing he would chair Brisbane’s Airtrain City Link after he left the Lord Mayoralty, an ethically controversial move reeking of unacceptable conflicts. A day or so later I had a short and unplanned conversation with Jim in the corridor of a suburban doctor’s surgery. He was on his way out of a medical consultation and I was on my way in. I advised him to “rethink things” about the Airtrain role. The next day on ABC Radio, to my amazement, he was able to use his encounter with me quite forcefully, as the key to explaining his change of mind on this questionable appointment!  

On 11 November 1999 the Queensland Parliament passed an amendment to The Public Sector Ethics Act which provided for an Office of Integrity Commissioner in Queensland, a part-time position which was an Australian first.  I had no input in the drafting of the amendment though, in presenting the Bill to Parliament, the Premier referred to me by name as having given the kind of advice the new Office might facilitate.  The Integrity Commissioner was responsible to the Premier and the role centred on providing confidential advice regarding possible conflicts of interest to the cabinet and other senior members of government as well as advice to the Premier on ethics generally, together with a responsibility to contribute to public understanding of these matters. It was a role I felt well qualified for, and indeed, I saw its potential as an appropriate practical outcome of my endeavours over the previous decade. So I applied for the position, being one of two persons interviewed initially. Rather fervently I anticipated being “the Premier’s man”. Time dragged on without any indication about the result of the interview. Eventually I learned that a retired Judge, Alan Demack, had been head-hunted for the position. His appointment was announced on 21 August 2000. 

I sought feedback on the interview once the appointment was finalized only to be told frankly by a non-government member of the interview panel that “many of the key players in Government regard the position as bullshit”, an observation followed by the clarification that, though I was the most qualified candidate, the position required someone who was acceptable politically. My disappointment at the time was profound, though other, perhaps more shrewd, observers (including Tony Fitzgerald and journalist David Solomon) assured me that my record as a social critic meant I was never going to be appointed.  Once again I had to come to terms with the reality that my faith in an ALP government was far too exaggerated. My destiny as a political and ethical player was “on the boundary”. At the same time new and probably more fulfilling challenges became possible, including several years of talkback radio on ethical issues across ABC Statewide – initiated in the first instance by the ABC’s Steve Austin who opined that such an opportunity was a better use of my talents than being tied up in the bureaucracy!

Subsequently, my academic adversary Bill De Maria and Courier-Mail journalist Chris Griffiths, apparently used Freedom of Information processes to try to understand the manoeuvres within government regarding the Integrity Commissioner appointment. So I was to learn of a memo authored by Dr Glyn Davis, chair of the selection committee, to the Premier which said of my suitability for the position, that despite being impressed by my commitment and capacities, “it was agreed that (Dr Preston) may have some difficulty providing advice to senior government figures, and may not be accepted as an effective operator by both sides of politics”.   This was, in effect, confirmation of what I had learned informally, that within the ranks of the Beattie Government there are deep divisions about the value of ethics measures as well as ambivalence about my political reliability. Certainly, if I had been appointed Integrity Commissioner, I would have sought to lift its public profile, while accepting the restraints of the position, and been more proactive than the first incumbent proved to be, in terms of seeking opportunities to advise the Premier and to cultivate wider public awareness of ethics in government issues – all reasons why some, probably including the many who never went near the first Commissioner, would have found my presence irritating. That said, despite the ongoing goading of journalist Peter Wear, perhaps the low key way the role has developed to date, together with the legal experience of  Integrity Commissioner Demack, has given a good start to this Office of which I have been a vocal supporter. I find it one of those pleasing quirks that in the Australian context, this experiment in public ethics has been tried first in Queensland, with its dubious history of political morality.

There is irony in the fact that Premier Beattie, an erstwhile proponent of accountability and integrity in government, has presided over an administration marred by repeated reports of ministerial indiscretion, cronyism and excessive secrecy, regularly challenged by  Auditor-General Len Scanlan, and the unofficial opposition, The Courier- Mail. The Premier’s biggest test came over the CJC’s Shepherdson Inquiry in late 2000 into instances of electoral rorting by ALP officials. His successful strategy – a strategy with some substance – has been to ride out these ethical misadventures conceding they are “character building” while portraying himself as a leader who is “above the fray”, untarnished by the unsavoury dealings of the  political rank and file. 

Comparison has been drawn between him and that other populist, Joh Bjelke-Petersen. But it is too superficial to  suggest that Beattie models himself on the former Premier, though, like Bjelke-Petersen, Peter Beattie is a consummate populist politician. As such he is far too prone to treat issues requiring management with “a political fix” on the basis that “I’ll do what’s right, trust me, but there are political factors to be managed”. The so called “Winegate affair” involving the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs was an early example of how this strategy can come unstuck. I find myself at times wishing the Beattie Government would allow itself a good dose of the propriety which was characteristic of his predecessor Wayne Goss, who would never be confused with Bjelke-Petersen.

In The Premiers of Queensland I authored the essay about Peter Beattie. It records the story of his premiership to mid 2001 just after his second election victory. In 2005, after Commissioner Davies’ Health Inquiry and unmistakable signs of secrecy and continuing damage control, I see many flaws in the Beattie government not evident then, though there are also policy achievements to note. That said, I stand by the political estimate I made of him in that essay: “As a political personality Beattie is complex and contradictory. He combines the intuitive and the reflective, the pragmatic and the idealistic, the consultative and the authoritarian, while never failing to be decent in his dealings with people, even those opposing him.”  A more up to date record of his leadership since 2002 would show how extended incumbency, a reluctance to publicly discipline some Cabinet ministers and an overwhelming parliamentary majority have contributed to a blemished record in terms of the Premier’s stated commitments to accountability and openness. No longer can he portray himself as “above the fray”. This period has also coincided with the retirement of his original appointee as Director General of the Department of Premier and Cabinet, Dr Glyn Davis who, I suspect, was a counter influence on that aspect of the Premier’s style which gravitates toward political expediency. At the same time there has been an increase in the influence of other elements in Government that are contemptuous of the restraints which measures aimed at integrity in Government may provide. 

Institutionalising Ethics –  Failure or Success?
During the nineties the focus of my work was the construction of institutional integrity, through advocating and embedding ethical guidance and compliance in political and public policy institutions via multi-faceted strategies.  The structures of accountability which were initiated in Queensland after the Fitzgerald Inquiry have now been in place for more than a decade. There is an expanding corpus of experience with public sector ethics in other Australian jurisdictions and internationally, some of it directly promoted through the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development. Given the local and international networks of public sector ethics that have resulted, the question can begin to be answered, Is it all worthwhile? Is it mission impossible to develop worthwhile ethics protocols for government? 

The nature of politics and organizational cultures generally, especially in the context of a globalizing economy and public sectors under stress, ensures that no simple answer can be provided. Occasionally the requirements of accountability can create burdens interfering with timely procedures. However, it is my conviction, based to an extent on comparing the present with the dangerous period of government in Queensland in the seventies and early eighties, that mechanisms to enhance ethics, integrity and public accountability in government are as essential to the maintenance of the body politic of liberal democracy as are the vital organs in a human body. If there appear to be more and more instances of ethical indiscretion in our public life these days, it may be this is mainly the result of greater sensitivity to, and awareness of, these matters. Those who belittle these mechanisms should consider the alternative. After all, if nothing is done, the triumph of administrative evil is likely to be greater. It is all too easy to take a cynical line about what has been achieved, or to misrepresent the attempts to institutionalize ethics as “social control” leading to “new levels of duplicity”. Bill de Maria, one of these cynical critics in Queensland , who has latterly described himself as a public sector ethicist, reveals the ideologically driven level of his anarcho-marxist argument when he pathetically compared moves to enhance public probity in Australia, like those in Queensland, with the Taliban’s program for the Preservation of Virtue and Elimination of Vice.
 
I make no apology for my belief that, despite its imperfections, liberal democracy remains the best available form of government. In saying this, I contend that the espousal of liberal democracy should not lead to silence on the agenda of social democracy, which at its best is centred on fundamental questions of social ethics and social justice, or the cultivation of a caring community and social cohesion in a multicultural society .  I need no persuasion that ethics programs within the institutions of liberal democracy are problematic and often flawed in implementation. There is still a fair way to go in our liberal democracy to convince many of Australia’s politicians and senior bureaucrats that these ethics measures should be matters of priority because they may actually assist, enable and protect them, just as, when adopted in good faith, they can contribute to restoring some confidence in our public institutions. Of course ‘ethics in government’ will always be mediated through politics. The tension between seeing these measures primarily as ‘a political fix’ and as ‘intrinsically valuable’ will remain, making the attitude of leaders and their understanding of the importance of ethical adherence critical, in the parliamentary sphere as well as in the bureaucracy. 

In Queensland the political culture has certainly not been dramatically transformed, but we have come some distance from the time when the local police sergeant automatically held the winner of the last race for turning a blind eye to an illegal SP bookie, or when MPs pocketed a donation for organizing a Golden Casket licence for a mate, or when cabinet ministers accepted parcels of shares from a company who benefited from their decisions. Yet charges of ethical impropriety by public officials still regularly surface, and the big end of town is courted for political advantage.  The point is, shady deals now mostly see the light of day, and there are better procedures to address them. But it will always be timely to recall Commissioner Tony Fitzgerald’s warning that only eternal vigilance will keep the forces of darkness at bay. 

Despite the list of issues tackled and measures instituted there are many persistent problems which malignantly erode the prospects of good government in the Australian context, trends which threaten to undo the objectives towards which a public sector ethics regime is directed. Some require taking the reform tools more seriously, like tackling the tendency to secrecy in government through a more comprehensive application of Freedom of Information legislation and through greater transparency in the way watchdog bodies operate. Others involve tidying up procedures to remove opportunities for the misuse of public office. For instance, there is much we could learn from some jurisdictions in Canada and the United States which place defined limits on the way public officials might use their office to line up post-employment opportunities. Similarly, to reduce the likelihood that politicians’ entitlements are misused, it may be better if a lump sum entitlement amount were automatically available, as happens in France, making the official accountable to demonstrate to the tax office that the entitlement was used for legitimate public purposes. 

Still, there are more deep seated trends in our political life which currently jeopardize good government and must be addressed if public confidence is to be maintained in our political institutions. The politicization of the public service which permeates below the level of Chief Executive Officers in most jurisdictions has muddied the waters of frank and fearless advice so essential to good government, subverting the wider national interest and the common good for narrow political interests.  Under the Howard government, several episodes in Canberra, such as the “children overboard affair” and the misuse of intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction, have undermined public trust to the point where one of Australia’s more distinguished retired diplomats  has declared that the concept of truth in government is seriously eroded adding, “It is a sad commentary on the integrity of our Government that the cartoonists in our major newspapers now regularly caricature the Prime Minister and several of his senior colleagues as liars…”.

There are other disturbing trends. One trend is the widespread reality of nepotism among elected representatives compounded by the fact that, increasingly, the major parties offer voters candidates with no previous personal or professional experience outside politics, products of a party political career path. Altogether the ethos of our major political parties is a key matter to be addressed if the political ethos generally is to move toward better practice.  The raison d’étre of political parties is simply to win, a goal which often creates a political morality dominated by  “whatever it takes”. Moreover, the imperative to fall into line with the party view usually overrides individual conscience and that can have a morally corrosive effect.  On the other hand, some minor parties glory in the self-delusion of moral excellence shrouded in a flimsy mandate of keeping the bastards honest.

Then there is the personal factor, the individual character question. Centuries ago the German reformer Martin Luther made the point that if it came to a choice he would prefer a wicked but wise prince to a moral but stupid one. On that argument it is preferable to have a leader who opposes the use of nuclear weapons guiding the foreign policy of a nuclear power than one who, though scrupulously honest and sexually monogamous, is a nuclear redneck ready to push the button at the slightest whim. So how important is a public official’s personal morality? This is a question which drew me into public debate many times in the wake of the most notorious such case in the 1990s, President Bill Clinton’s graphically documented liaison with Monica Lewinsky. The short answer is that there is no relevance in an official’s private conduct unless it impacts on the ability to maintain public trust in the exercise of public office. So, a credible public sector ethics program does not concern itself with matters of private morality.

Traditionally, with some notable exceptions , the laudable Australian custom is to avoid public and media reference to such matters. But, at the end of the day, is that good enough, and does it satisfy the public’s right to know the kind of persons leading them (or aspiring to) in government? In several Queensland cases in the 1990s Ministers of the Crown were undergoing marriage breakdowns and allegedly pursuing extra-marital relationships. Though the pressures of public office are a factor in such cases, at the time I felt constrained to observe, accurately as it has transpired, that the work and staff of these Ministers suffer in these circumstances to the detriment of the public interest. “Failure of personal character” in a public official, whatever that means, generally counts for something, for it can disturb good government and may undermine public confidence in government. While personal witch-hunts must not be the core business of public sector ethics regimes, integrity in government may suffer when personal integrity is diminished. As time passes and my observation of political practice extends I am convinced that an ethic of public responsibility ultimately requires not only institutional safeguards but a personal commitment, that is officials who exercise their public trust as persons of good conscience.  
 

Traditionally, with some notable exceptions , the laudable Australian custom is to avoid public and media reference to such matters. But, at the end of the day, is that good enough, and does it satisfy the public’s right to know the kind of persons leading them (or aspiring to) in government? In several Queensland cases in the 1990s Ministers of the Crown were undergoing marriage breakdowns and allegedly pursuing extra-marital relationships. Though the pressures of public office are a factor in such cases, at the time I felt constrained to observe, accurately as it has transpired, that the work and staff of these Ministers suffer in these circumstances to the detriment of the public interest. “Failure of personal character” in a public official, whatever that means, generally counts for something, for it can disturb good government and may undermine public confidence in government. While personal witch-hunts must not be the core business of public sector ethics regimes, integrity in government may suffer when personal integrity is diminished. As time passes and my observation of political practice extends I am convinced that an ethic of public responsibility ultimately requires not only institutional safeguards but a personal commitment, that is officials who exercise their public trust as persons of good conscience.  

Re-visioning Politics
Perhaps unreasonably, I have always hoped that the pursuit of ethical discourse and practice in the sphere of politics might generate ‘political soul searching’ pointing toward that which Vaclev Havel, the former poet-president of the Czech Republic called “a politics of meaning…not the art of the useful, but politics as a practical morality, in service to the truth” . Across my lifetime there have been few who have embodied this quest. Indeed, there have been many who represent its antithesis, masters of the political exploitation of fear even though they were not devoid of moral conviction; John Howard and Joh Bjelke-Petersen are Australian exemplars of this type. I have had my say about the former Queensland Premier. What then of Prime Minister Howard? Bearing in mind one needs to be guarded about absolute judgments made while a head of government is still in office. Howard has certainly proved to be an effective leader, but, to what end? It appears that Australian culture has become excessively individualistic during his tenure. My feelings about John Howard probably solidified during the Tampa crisis and the way the asylum seeker issue was used in the 2001 election campaign. So disgusted was I that when I approached my local polling booth on election day I went straight up to the Liberal stand, on something of an unpremeditated impulse, and declared very audibly (and admittedly without much sensitivity for the stunned particular poll worker): “You’re Prime Minister has run the most  despicable election campaign in my lifetime”. I will forever despise the way xenophobic fear was injected into the Australian community under Howard’s leadership.

When I think of statesmen with a capacity for idealistic vision in my lifetime names that come to mind are John F Kennedy or Mikhail Gorbachev, or Australia’s John Curtin though at the end of the day they were inevitably consumed by the need for pragmatic decisions. So, can we hope that the practice of politics will cross the boundary of narrow and short-term interests? The inspirational political figures of my lifetime are witnesses to the quest for ‘a politics of meaning’ often from outside the inner sanctum of power. I am thinking of the Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Aung Sun Su Kyi, Ireland’s Mary Robinson perhaps, or even a contemporary Australian, Bob Brown. Nelson Mandela undoubtedly sets the benchmark as a politician who exercised power while maintaining an ethical vision, as he pushed and reshaped political boundaries. For him the exercise of political power and the attainment of political office never became an end in itself, but rather was the product of a lifetime faithful to ‘politics in service to the truth’ and reconciliation. Another inspirational and effective figure was Dag Hammarskjold, the honoured Secretary-General of the United Nations Organisation, who I remember from my youth.  Hammarskjold illustrated the connection between the processes of good government and the need for just policy outcomes when he said: “Only they deserve power who justify its use daily”.  

An ancient seer once properly observed, “Without vision the people perish”. And yet, by and large, with the exception of Gough Whitlam’s and Paul Keating’s erratic flirtations with “the vision thing”, idealism and the visionary have been regarded as off limits in Australian politics. In Queensland, even though the upheaval caused by the Fitzgerald Inquiry set a foundation on which visions might be built, the best direction that has emerged is Peter Beattie’s theme “the Smart State”, primarily a rhetorical endorsement of technology as the pathway to a better future. It is time to address the invisibility of vision in contemporary public life, for our lives are driven by more than market considerations or consumption of the latest technology. Just as individuals need to make their lives with meaning, communities and nations look for something worthwhile to believe in. A sustainable and visionary politics is not just about economic management, it is about the things we can believe in together. Increasingly, that ‘we’ must be understood globally, not just within state borders, for ultimately the crucial  governance questions are being asked globally.

At this very time there are signs that a more explicit connection between values, religion and politics is emerging in Australia. Regrettably, however, its manifestation is most visible in the conservative, right-wing so called ‘family values’ push with its simplistic and fundamentalist shibboleths and its spokespersons like Fred Nile MP and the Sydney Anglican Jensen brothers. As political scientist Marion Maddox  has argued, under John Howard the forces of the ‘religious right’ in Australia have become significantly entrenched in Australian political culture, successful at the ballot box and a significant influence in policy determination – to say nothing of the willing conspiracy between Howard and an American President who is beholden to interests with a conservative, and rather odd-ball, mixture of fundamentalist religious views and right wing political ideologies. Just as the connection between one version of Christian morality and conservative politics in Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland caused some of us to declare an explicit, alternative religious and political witness, it is time for such a movement across Australia to challenge the cynical or simplistic marriage of the religious and political right. Social justice values, contrasting with those sometimes emphasized by the Hillsong revivalists and Cardinal George Pell, need renewed political emphasis from faith-based sources. Moreover, rather than hiding from public discussion of religion and politics, as has been the Australian impulse for decades, it’s time for a more open critique of the role of religion and belief in Australian politics, to both enhance and protect our democracy as well as to expose spurious religiosity and moralism. Within the current political dialogue the role of Labor MP Kevin Rudd in this regard is significant. Curiously, those who have sought to forge a link between a conservative kind of Christianity and a conservative kind of politics do us the favour of bringing to mind a maxim which politics in this country has tried to avoid: that ethical vision and spiritual resources are a necessary component of creative and compassionate politics.  

Though it may sound like sloganising, what we need for the ongoing transformation of our collective life is a “politics with soul”, a transforming politics which not only rejects the pathological nature of the point-scoring style of everyday politics but which also promotes the contest of ideas, recognizing the role of local communal activism and the place of the non-government civil society sector. Politics with soul is nurtured in the dialectic between love, justice and power. A politics with soul takes the idea of integrity seriously, not just in a limited sense consistent with public sector ethics, but particularly in the wider sense of integrating the public agenda with concern for personal wholeness. Politics with soul acknowledges that political practice may benefit from a spirituality with a dual focus on the political and the personal, a spirituality that may be derived only marginally from institutional religion, though it would be enriched by stirrings in current theological dialogue which are contextualised in political and ecological terms. Fashioned in this crucible we may expect political leadership which moves toward designing and implementing policy with compassion, where means matter as well as ends, and where utilitarianism is tempered by sensitivity to society’s most vulnerable.  In challenging the dominant individualism of our age, politics with soul aims to recover commitment to the social good, aware that short-term benefits and choices must sometimes be eschewed in favour of the long-term. Politics with soul also redefines the discourse about measuring “the economy”, as the visionary Matthew  Fox expresses it:

Do not tell us whether our economy is growing in Gross National product yearly: rather, tell us whether our world-wide economics are accomplishing the following: housing for the homeless, feeding the hungry, educating the ignorant, caring for the sick, humanizing the prisons, creating good work for the unemployed, encouraging technology with a human face, passing on nature’s energies to other generations. 

In my view to say all this is not to depart from political realism. The so called visionary turns out to be realistic precisely because vision is necessary if we are to arrive at sustainability and the common good, and, in the end, democratic politics which ignores sustainability and the common good is not viable.  In the past these visionary “true believers” were characterized as “the Left”, sometimes in league with small ‘l’ liberals.  I look to a new Left generation for leadership in articulating key directions for politics with soul. Frankly, billions of people throughout the world face a bleak future if the Left remains buried in the rubble of state socialism. Within Australia, Peter Botsman, Lindsay Tanner and Clive Hamilton are representative of the handful of reflective practitioners with substantial ideas to contribute. They share the conviction that the environment movement is the most likely source of new moral energy for the “new Left”. Hamilton, Director of the Australia Institute, has thrown out a significant challenge to the traditional Left suggesting that the preoccupation with economic poverty is misplaced in a society like Australia. Not that there is no poverty in Australian society, but the more urgent challenge is set against the background of  over-consumption rather than material deprivation, a state of affairs which has not made for a happier society and is certainly ecologically unsustainable.  Hamilton urges social progressives to address the political challenge in a more holistic way which still requires a just distribution of social goods such as health and education but which also includes the adjustment he calls ‘downshifting’ to a simpler lifestyle, concluding: “We need a politics for a society in which the citizens are committed to a rich life rather than a life of riches”.  

In addition, politics with soul engages seriously with the professions and large public institutions. The phrase ‘the long march through the institutions’ was coined by social theorist Herbert Marcuse to describe the centrality of key institutions in bringing about social change. Usually from the boundary, sometimes as an insider struggling for justice (in my case in the institutions of the church, education and politics), many of us have learnt that this is slow, hard, daunting, thankless but necessary work. I have observed effective social movements, like the conservation movement, making the shift from direct action, through to using the classroom and the ballot box, and eventually to exercising an impact inside corporate boardrooms. 

This realisation is one reason why, in 2002, after a decade or so of using the tools of public sector ethics to engage parliamentarians and bureaucrats, I made the transition from academia to work again under the banner of the Uniting Church within the community services sector as inaugural Director of the UnitingCare Centre for Social Justice in Queensland. I was engaged by a colleague of my youth, Bruce Alcorn, to lift the advocacy profile of this arm of the church of which he was Director. As the “social justice conscience” within a large multi-million dollar welfare enterprise I encountered once again – this time as an insider - the conflicts, tensions and limitations of implementing an ideal. Nonetheless this role presented an opportunity from within a large institution , and on behalf of it, to advocate and educate for ethics and social justice in social policy; it presented another vantage to ask the questions important to politics with soul, possibly in a more holistic way. In three years (2002, 2003 and 2004) we issued three major research Reports – on vulnerable children, family homelessness and prison release policy and practice. Each Report irritated the relevant State Government minister at the time but, somewhat prophetically each issue has subsequently become a public focus for much needed social policy reform. 

Across the nineties, as I reflected ethically on the nature of public institutions I was drawn to revisit the idea of ‘vocation’ especially in public office . In that context the notion of ‘vocation’ has been lost in a tide of careerism to the point where it now sounds rather quaint. Yet I insist that the re-visioning of politics and government requires a return to this idea which sociologist Max Weber advanced in a different era. Those functions which are premised on working for, and serving, the public good surely require something more than technical expertise. In an overall way they require a special sense of ethical vision. In our contemporary context I was encouraged to come across a clear statement of this position by the Premier of Western Australia, Dr Geoff Gallop in The Parliamentarian:

An MP has a broader and deeper responsibility to the public than most other occupations… The role itself is best compared to a ‘vocation’ rather than a ‘job’. A vocation is defined as a call to, or a sense of fitness for, a career or occupation, while a job is a piece of work or employment, especially when done for hire or profit’.   

Vocations are linked to institutions which in turn have an ethos, even rituals, rules of membership, or a code of expected conduct, all based on the fundamental purpose of the institution. When public office is understood in this vocational sense, the foundation is laid for integrity in government and a commitment to the common good. Politics with soul becomes more possible. Yet, to be realistic, not even this idealized vision of politics is likely to uncover the holy grail of a society which fully delivers social justice, but at least it perpetuates the determination not to surrender to lesser goals.

Reframing Social Justice
In the last three or four decades I have rejoiced when the forces promoting social justice were seemingly victorious: as when the Whitlam and Fraser governments legislated for human rights; or when people power swept the Filipino dictator Marcos out of office; when the segregation laws of the USA’s southern states were over-ridden; and most especially when Nelson Mandela led the ANC beyond the era of South African apartheid. But in every case the promise of these dramatic social changes was not fulfilled. Subsequently, a certain disillusionment eventually soured the struggle for social justice. The instruction of my lifetime leads me to temper programs for justice with realism, for an ideal like social justice, though essential, will remain elusive in practice. Moreover, campaigns for social justice may have ambiguous, even counter productive, outcomes. 

As the term “social justice” was omitted more and more from the lexicon of Australian governments in the 1990s even social justice advocates showed a preference for less confronting nomenclature like “social inclusion” and began to champion a “third way”. In fact shifts in the social discourse indicate how individualism has supplanted a sense of the common good: we now accept the reification of “the economy” or the “market-place”; the new economic-speak refers to “customers” while we hear too little of the concept of “citizenship”; we rarely speak of the “public service”, hearing rather of a “public sector” which has been “downsized, outsourced and corporatised”. We need to recover an understanding that the ethical justification for economic arrangements is that they serve “the common good”. As John Ralston Saul’s treatise The Unconscious Civilization suggests, it is time for us to wake up to the  fact that we must recover a sense of public responsibility based on an ethic of interdependence – a notion fundamental to what we mean by social justice. 
 
Consequently, in some quarters, as with the Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, concepts like “equality” become bastardized, emptied of any sense of the affirmative action which equality with justice requires for severely disadvantaged groups. Right-wing influences have eroded the sense of “justice as fairness” – made philosophically relevant in liberal democracies by the impact of the Harvard academic, John Rawls . Rawls effectively revived the Aristotelian dictum that there is nothing so unequal as the equal treatment of unequals, emphasizing that discrimination is warranted when it aids the disadvantaged. A recent assault on this approach was the flirtation with mandatory sentencing in some Australian jurisdictions preventing the criminal justice system from dispensing justice in an appropriately discriminatory way. Even more outrageous was the appropriation of the language of justice by George W Bush after 11 September, 2001, who named his retaliation on terrorism “Operation Infinite Justice”.  

In my view, to abandon the term justice (and its content) to this right wing agenda and to submit to taunts about “bleeding hearts” from  some political quarters is to deny the fruits of both the biblical prophetic tradition and the hard won gains of the liberal social democratic tradition. That is why, in 2001, when I was asked to develop an initiative for the Uniting Church’s community service group in Queensland, I was delighted we rejected the pleas of some that the term, ‘social justice’, was passé or counter productive. Instead we nominated the initiative, the Centre for Social Justice. A key element of that Centre’s activity has been to focus on the reality of poverty and financial disadvantage in Australia’s hitherto egalitarian society. Certain opinion making forces, such as the conservative think tank Centre for Independent Studies, have exploited the complexity of this matter, particularly in relation to the problematic use of poverty lines. 

While the claim can be validly made that in recent years the poorest in Australian society have had some improvement in their living standards, the undeniable and disturbing fact is that Australia is becoming an hourglass society with a shrinking middle class in which the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting relatively poorer. Meanwhile access to the bulwarks of a fair society, quality public education and healthcare, is becoming more difficult for more and more citizens. Unfortunately, the creation of so called choice in these matters for those who aspire to greater affluence has become a platform of social policy, threatening to overtake the struggling minority for whom choice and aspiration is a cruel hoax. In such circumstances an insistence on social justice is imperative.

On a larger scale, in a globalised world with its technologically driven economies, let alone on an environmentally threatened planet, an understanding of social justice must be revisited. The conceptual boundaries traditionally circumscribing this term must be expanded. Only when we reframe the economic agenda to start seeing it as one which serves the planetary community will we have a chance of establishing the common good. 

At the outset of this new millennium, as citizens of a global village, or as bio-components of this planetary organism, Gaia, our generation of homo sapiens can reflect more accurately than our predecessors on the story of life, the magnificence of spaceship Earth and the wonder of the universe. Our scientific and technological expertise not only gives us greater knowledge but also a greater ethical responsibility. Until recently, life on Earth flourished, but in my lifetime the level of damage done to a system that has been almost five billion years in the making gives us cause to reconsider the most important ethical question: how ought we live with the Earth?

My sensitivity to this question has been strengthened as I have aged. Conversations with my wife, Coralie, whose interest in astronomy and bird-watching along with a deep commitment to eco-feminism, have enriched my understanding. Times of serious illness have generated the potent insight that my individual and embodied self is but part of a greater whole. Life is bigger than any particular expression of life. Healing times in rainforests, at the beach or with the humpback whales, together with reading an emerging body of literature around environmental ethics and eco-spirituality have expanded  my worldview and theology. I now see that “social analysis” and “bio analysis” (the analysis of life systems) must be linked – an argument advanced by the feminist Indian ecologists, Vandana Shiva and Arundati Roy. Another influential author is Thomas Berry, a priest who calls himself as a ‘ecologian’ rather than a ‘theologian’, and who is described by Theodore Roszak as “the bard of the new cosmology”. Berry  makes a claim about the human spirit which emphasizes the fundamental place of bio analysis: 

We have no inner spiritual life if we don’t have the outer experience of a beautiful world.  

Complementing this observation is that of another leading thinker, Franciscan theologian Leonardo Boff . He invites us to link social analysis with bio analysis. 

The most threatened threatened of nature’s creatures are the poor…

Taken together these insights suggest a need to extend our understanding of social justice to what is better termed “eco-justice”. Eco-justice signifies that poverty in human societies is an ecological problem, just as violations of nature’s biodiversity and the biosphere have exacerbated the extent of global poverty. Therefore to achieve eco-justice we must not only address environmental degradation but also challenge the exploitation of the poor. Eco-justice will not be achieved while one section of earth’s population lives in an orgy of unrestrained consumption and the rest destroys its environment just to survive. If global equity were to be achieved by all poorer economies reaching the consumption level of the United States, the annual global environmental damage from the resulting economic activities is inconceivable – 220 times what it is now. 

The contemporary challenge is consistent with the message we were articulating in Action for World Development in the 1970s, a message sometimes summarized by the slogan, “Live simply so others can simply live”. Not surprisingly therefore one of the most compelling and comprehensive expositions of eco-justice comes from the liberation theology voice, Leonardo Boff. The introduction to his evocatively titled Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor is clear:
 
It is not only the poor and oppressed that must be liberated; today all humans must be liberated. We are hostages to a paradigm that places us – against the thrust of the universe – over things instead of being with them in the great cosmic community. That is why I am extending the intuitions of liberation theology and demonstrating their validity and applicability for the questions enveloping the Earth, our bountiful mother 

In the Felix Arnott Memorial lecture  which I delivered in 2002 I outlined a theory of eco-justice which is fundamentally grounded in biological sustainability together with a view that the membership of the society in which we are to practice justice must be inclusive of all living beings, non-human as well as human. I cited Anne Primavesi who calls for an approach to justice “which sees violations through the eyes of the powerless victims of development, of progress, of technical fixes; of those whose cultures have been ransacked and whose peoples, whether in Irian Jaya, Ogoniland or the cloud forests of Colombia, have been ruined” . 

I agree. Eco-justice must be passionate and empathetic, emanating primarily from our capacity to care rather than being simply based on rationality. Like social justice, eco-justice requires the constant nourishment of love if it is be transformative in the face of inequalities of power. Eco-justice is premised on an ecocentric understanding of the interconnectedness of all life on earth, which respects, values, loves and cares about all life. It therefore highlights the responsibility of human beings to promote the common good through right relating with all life forms. 

In Search of a Global Ethic
As the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first century it became commonplace to speak of “globalization”, the inexorable integration of markets, nation states and technologies to a degree never witnessed before . The significance of national boundaries has been altered forever. Currently globalization’s driving idea is free market capitalism. Many of my friends in the social movements began to rail against this development as though globalization were an unmitigated evil. However, while I acknowledge that those who assaulted the barricades in the S 11 protest against the World Economic Forum and the World Trade Organisation in Seattle and later Turin and Melbourne drew much-needed attention to the dangers posed by globalization to the most vulnerable on this planet, I believe their analysis was too simplistic. Globalization is inevitable – and in fact has been developing throughout my entire lifetime – and the real challenge is to appropriate the benefits of this process for the common good. I find myself in agreement with one of the world’s richest men, George Soros, who claimed in The Bubble of American Supremacy, published in the hope that it might impact on the American presidential campaign of 2004, “Collective needs and social justice receive short shrift because the development of the international institutions that would be necessary for their promotion has not kept pace with the development of markets.” Certainly we must challenge globalization as a narrow and lop-sided economic juggernaut by supporting the case that a global society needs new institutions and democratic, empowering governance structures.

 It is not good enough that we rely for global governance on a faltering United Nations Organisation in tandem with the socalled Bretton Woods’ offspring like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and their cousin, the World Economic Forum. Furthermore, it will be very dangerous if experiments toward global governance are, by default, dominated and manipulated by the American Empire. My hope (and it is little more than that in these Howard years) is that a middle power like Australia will play a proactive and creative role in designing democratic global institutions.  

But new global governance structures will require an emerging global consensus about values  which, while respecting cultural diversity and supporting democratic institutions, challenges the global economy to serve the interests of life on Earth for future generations. Indeed, it is my conviction that the urgent task in the twenty-first century is the development and enculturation of a global ethic which articulates axioms that give expression to eco-justice. Increasingly there have been moves in this direction, sometimes under the banner of the United Nations’ Educational Social and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) or the World Parliament of Religions, but, in my experience, most notably in the Earth Charter initiative. 

The Earth Charter emerged as a follow up project to the Rio Earth Summit of 1992. Launched in 2000 this global ethics statement is being endorsed by a growing number of government bodies. The Earth Charter’s core values are grouped in four categories: Respect and Care for the Community of Life; Ecological Integrity; Social and Economic Justice; Democracy, Non-violence and Peace. While those who drafted it hope it becomes as significant in the twenty-first century as the Declaration of Human Rights was in the twentieth, detractors label the Charter as merely idealistic words, as if the articulation of visions for change is irrelevant. My retort is that the Earth Charter exercise is not an end in itself but rather a contributor to the necessary global conversation about the kind of global society we ought to build .

In 2000 I turned to local Christian social justice activists, together with others including environmentalists, my colleagues at Griffith University and most notably the Brisbane congregation of a lay Japanese Buddhist group, Soka Gakkai, to realise the vision of Brisbane hosting an Asia Pacific Regional Earth Charter Conference. In particular I contacted my friend Clem Campbell, the erstwhile chair of the first Queensland Parliamentary Ethics Committee who had helped me organise earlier public sector ethics conferences. In his retirement, liberated from party shackles, Clem was eager to give expression to his core ideals. Convening an international event potentially involving a wide constituency around a document which was everybody’s business but in reality was virtually nobody’s priority, proved to be one of the largest organising challenges of my activist life. With a great team effort we succeeded and were inspired over three days in November 2001 with 350 delegates from sixteen nations across our region and from countries as diverse as Nepal and Fiji.

The Asia Pacific Earth Charter Conference took place only weeks after the cataclysmic event of 9/11, that horrendous and insane act of terrorism in the United States. 9/11 dramatically changed the nature of global politics and gave the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, a political climate he could manipulate electorally in similar fashion to the way Robert Menzies exploited the so called Domino Theory and the Communist threat in my youth. In speeches I gave after 11 September, 2001, I found myself drawn to an apt quotation : “It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness”. But cursing, rather than enlightenment, seems to be the order of the day, drowning the voices of internationalists like Kofi Anan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Clearly the terrorist tactics of extreme Muslims require a forceful and serious response. It must also be a careful and intelligent response not obsessed with military solutions, but recognizing the multiple causes of this phenomenon such as the demonic political and religious fundamentalism on all sides, or the gross inequities in the world, represented too often in the excessive lifestyles of the western bloc nations led by the USA, as well as in the historically imposed unjust solutions to national boundaries in the Middle East during the twentieth century. If ever there was a time for visionary leadership and for an appreciation of the global necessity for nations to listen to the Earth Charter it is now. Granted, the task of translating ethical pieties into workable policies is not only complex but is also a task which must take account of the complexities of life together on Earth. 
 
There is no other way. A new politics is necessary if the vision of the Earth Charter is to be realized. It is not too glib to say that such new politics requires a change of heart in most of us. In contemporary Australian politics only the Greens articulate that vision consistently, though I have no doubt that there are elements and key persons in the major parties who are amenable to its message. If these political forces are to make progress, we, the citizens, must first name and eschew politics which exploits fear and which thrives on short-term, blind self-interest rather than generating hope based in enlightened self-interest. So, the transformation of politics is much more than the practice of accountability. It requires political practice that is itself transformative, responding to the nobility of human beings, a nobility derived not from domination over life on Earth but from humanity’s capacity for stewardship on behalf of life on Earth, mandated as it is through our species’ place of responsible dependence within the biosphere.

Chapter Eight
BOUNDARIES OF THE INNER LIFE

Intimacy and Integrity – A Recurring Theme
In my youth a joyous, energising ‘conversion experience’ propelled me into ministry. Life’s later ‘conversions’ were tinged with pain, depression, loss and grief – most specially a broken marriage and the recurring shadow of cancer. These dark and difficult times were also times of dangerous yet liberating clarity, occasions of ecstasy – literally ‘standing outside oneself’ (as the original Greek, ekstasis, suggests) – periods of doubt and despair, interspersed with rich seasons of personal growth, and spaces for empowerment and the renewal of energy and vision. 

Spurred on by these rude interruptions I also learnt the value of ‘retreat’, first, as I recounted earlier, in 1981 during eight days of silence directed by a Jesuit priest in the Victorian suburb of Richmond. Regularly, across the next two decades, I retreated with silence into the rainforests of the Numinbah Valley, occasionally by the Pacific Ocean at Yamba or, on one especially significant sojourn, in a Buddhist Vipassana retreat in the Blue Mountains. I was discovering the experience of mysticism and, for the first time in my life, encountering the witness of mystics like the medieval Dominican Meister Eckhart and his reminder that, “deep within, everyone has a vintage wine cellar that they seldom drink from.” I learnt that silence is the stairway to that cellar. Feeling at home with silence – especially when it is mediated through direct experiences of nature - was an enlivening and surprising discovery which drew me into my interior world, promising healing for hurts of the past. Gradually I learnt to cherish and prize how solitude moved me beyond anxiety about  separation and loneliness to a place of self-discovery and the mystical sense of unity with all, opening up experiences of discernment especially through exploring and ordering one’s deep desires. Meanwhile, an appreciation of soulful music took deep root within me. I discovered Rachmaninov’s Concerto No.2! Its cadences and romantic melodies in a minor key connected profoundly with inner rhythms of my psyche, inviting me to explore how music might enrich my inner life. Many times, crescendos of the brain followed by sweet flowing passages in harmony with the composer, would release and revisit sighs within, too deep for words.

All this was going on while I was climbing the ladder of academic achievement. This was also a period when I continued to be a social activist and offer ethical opinions in the media. As I dabbled in social issues, the inner journey was not so much a pathway to sainthood, as  a necessity for sheer survival at times; but, particularly, the boundaries of the inner life were sites of struggle for a sense of authenticity and integrity. 

Across the years the idea of integrity has become central to my self-understanding. Indeed, my experience confirms the view of the seminal stage development theorist, Erik Erikson. Erikson names the challenge for personal growth in the latter stages of life as the achievement of integrity, which involves bringing together all the successes and failures of a life journey, with a certain wisdom and serenity. Integrity suggests a connection and consistency between the externalities of one’s life, our conduct toward others, and an interior life, our private thoughts, our prayers, dreams and fears. If integrity is not achieved, then this later stage of life may become one of despair, an existential mood which I have experienced at times as I have sought to transcend despondency through a stronger sense of integrity. 

Integrity has been described as “the consummate virtue”. Of course, the idea of integrity is an important notion in the public sector ethics lexicon. In broader social ethics terms, integrity suggests the need to integrate faithfully a respect for all life with a comprehensive commitment to justice. At a personal level integrity’s requirement for consistency can be a pretty tough call. 

Under the searchlight of close examination, I am conscious of inconsistencies and hypocrisies. In the multi-faceted recesses of my inner life I have felt the challenge of integrity sharply on two fronts – my failure to pursue wholeheartedly a lifestyle that is consistent with my vision of eco-justice and my mistakes in intimate relationships most graphically evidenced by the fact that I have been divorced. Consequently, mindful of my own shortcomings, my counsel to anyone charged with promoting integrity is to exercise moral judgment with grace and humility. A person of integrity is especially conscious of the ambiguities and limitations of the human condition. So, in the quest for integrity, the central theme of the inner journey, I have learnt that one needs compassion as well as time to sift through one’s passions and deep desires, to explore what has been termed “the love country”  whose contours are abundant yet barren, bitter but beautiful. In periods of inner turmoil, de profundis, I have been visited by the many faces of intimacy.

Like many before me, from time to time I have failed the intimacy test, threatening my personal integrity while hurting others and myself. Of course the very nature of intimacy suggests hidden experiences which defy clinical analysis and objective description. To know another intimately is a very special and sacred knowledge, a knowing characterized at times by self-deception but, paradoxically, one which opens a powerful pathway to self knowledge. Intimacy’s gifts are frequently unspeakable, unutterably known and felt in the depths of our being in ways which even death may be powerless to extinguish. Moreover, reverence for “the love country” requires that its sacred treasures – broken or intact - be kept from view. Indeed when there is an attempt to describe them, love’s outpourings of joy and despair are often best confined to poetry’s anonymity or the confidentiality of private journals. And yet, if this memoir is to give true expression to my life journey the broad contours of this terrain must be mapped and something of its impact on the traveler disclosed.

Several times, I have drunk deeply from the well of intimacy, knowing seasons of sensuality and especially the joy of giving and receiving in a sustained committed relationship. In these partnerships I recognize that my heterosexual behaviour exhibits the strengths and weaknesses of the romantic lover who seeks intimacy “in the deep interiority of the woman, in her natural mystery (looking) for her to be a source of wisdom, of sure intuition, a bottomless well of continually renewed strength”.  Such an approach is deeply flawed of course, not least because it assumes that one special other human being will meet all of one’s needs for inner well-being. As a result partners experience a deficit of mutuality and reciprocity, an unsustainable emotional imbalance. 

In my case, I have also been susceptibile to the vagaries generated by mixing my sense of mission and vocation with my intimacy needs on the one hand, and my erratic and unreliable response to absence or loss, on the other. More than once I have given up on love because I feared losing something. Loss and change – whether the occasion was moving from Brisbane to Melbourne, illness or even in later years traveling away from home in another hemisphere – triggered anxiety, reactive depression and irrational behaviour, sometimes leading to appalling impacts on others. 

Though some may scoff, others will know what I mean when I say that some of my lessons about loving have come through relating to our dog, Bazz. This lively part-Beagle came to Coralie and me in 1992. When we first met Bazz in the RSPCA refuge I was struck by his engaging and transfixing brown eyes for they communicated and invited love. I had a sense that it was the suffering which had brought him to the refuge that made them even more loving. Moreover, I felt that his love was something I could count on in my own suffering. Of course the bond we formed in the next twelve years was nurtured by food and attention but that alone does not account for the depths of intimacy, “the abyss of love” he opened up, as one writer  terms it. Bazz could never philosophise about love or justice, but his enjoyment of the simple things and the present moment reminded me constantly of virtues which are key ingredients for human intimacy. When he died, the ache of losing a loving relationship was unmistakable.  

As I nurse the wounds and cherish the trophies of life through more than six decades I have no doubt that the deep desire or longing of my life is to love and be loved. Within that desire there is a profound wish for reconciliation where love’s past bonds have been broken. Understandably, it is a longing that is often unfulfilled. However, one of the greatest joys and harbingers of inner serenity which has come my way in recent years was to achieve a real measure of reconciliation with my first deep love whom I excluded from my life about forty years ago. That reconnection not only brought tears of relief and regret but some healing of intimacy’s woundedness, a healing of suppressed memories.

I believe I can now articulate better than ever before what loving means, for myself anyway, though I am just as capable and culpable of failing to love and refusing to accept love as ever I was. Whatever “true love” is, it suggests a state of being which is marked by a deliberate choice to harness our longings for the good of another. This is why commitment is fundamental to true love, a commitment which respects the difference and frailty of the other, even when it requires reciprocity and mutuality.

In his masterly essay, the Art of Loving, Erich Fromm expands the idea of love beyond the interpersonal. He concludes: “Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one object of love…If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life.”  Fromm’s expression is similar to that articulated by mystics like Meister Eckhart who describe mystical encounters as an ecstatic experience of intimate love involving a transcending sense of the self’s union with all other beings. 

I have come to understand the quest for intimacy as a deeply spiritual endeavour, a stance toward life emanating from the centre of our personality, which promises to connect us to the source of life’s meaning. In ultimate terms, intimacy is an assuring knowledge and experience that I am not alone in the universe. As such it is beyond mere rationality. Rather it fosters an inner wisdom which may fine tune our approach to reality, that inner wisdom we colloquially refer to as “heart” knowledge rather than “head” knowledge.  To my painful cost, in the ebb and flow of intimacy, I have tended to give priority to the “head” while my deepest desires, the quest of the “heart”, were denied or seemingly lost, generating dark and scary moods of depression. 

Across more than twenty years of my life, I have needed medicated support for clinical depression, though to date I have never been hospitalised for the condition. Periods of depression lasting months have taught me that the torment of the mentally wounded should not be underestimated. Mental illness often creates a world of utter loneliness and meaningless. Crossing the mind’s boundaries to mental illness is frightening indeed. Compassion for those who feel overcome by this insufferable plight to the point where they find themselves outside the realm of love and life is a major ethical issue of our times. Self-diagnosis suggests to me that my tendency to depression is sometimes a symptom of the need, and quest, for intimacy, and, at the same time, of a failure at times to accept life’s limitations, including the reality that the desire for intimacy cannot always be fulfilled. But generally, I find depression is essentially a response to loss or perceived loss, whether those losses are self-inflicted or imposed through life’s misfortunes. Finally, with the accumulation of losses, a psychic wound of uncontrollable proportions at times not only immobilizes me but also impacts adversely on relationships. The devastation of hope which accompanies a loss of love can pitch a person into a depressive reaction. 

Similarly, the gulf between an ideal and reality - territory which is part and parcel of an ethicist’s concern – can set up the preconditions for depression. My experience also tells me that the idealist who is also an activist may be prone to such reaction. After all, like lovers, idealistic public activists make themselves vulnerable. Depression and burn-out is very common amongst those in social movements who struggle thanklessly, pitted against the odds, frequently encountering negative reinforcements. Not surprisingly then, many public activists crave acceptance as an antidote to the rejection and hostility which is their lot. 

Again and again I have discovered, usually painfully, that retreat to a place for recovering intimacy – by that I mean a profound intimacy grounded in inner compassion - brings solace, inner healing and renewal. I am sure I am not alone in craving what I call “a love that will not let me go”. This is a phrase I borrow from the lyrics of a hymn by the nineteenth century Scottish preacher George Matheson. Matheson was blind, though it was not that disability which caused him to compose but rather the wound he felt when he was rejected by his beloved:

O Love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee, I give Thee back the life I owe that, in Thine ocean depths, its flow may richer, fuller be..  

Matheson names a love that is not found in another human person, though it may be reflected and nurtured in particular loving human relationships. Essentially, as far as I can interpret it, such intimacy is cultivated and discovered deep within oneself, and is the bridge to a sense of peace and unity with all of life, and what might be characterized as “empathetic spirituality” connecting contemplation and transformative social action. This discovery is true in-sight. I clearly recall how this existential truth seized me in the solitude of the Numinbah rainforests in the months when I was recovering from the surgeon’s knife and my first life changing engagement with cancer.