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Whatsapp Bob Brown, Julian Burnside, Kerry O'Brien and Phillip Adams at the Tamar Valley Writers Festival.

We are relatively prosperous, well-educated, sane and safe, yet our country has become synonymous with glaring injustices. Bob Brown, Julian Burnside and Kerry O'Brien join Phillip Adams at the Tamar Valley Writers Festival for a wide-ranging discussion on Australia's past and future.

ON GROWING UP IN A DIFFERENT WORLD

Bob Brown: I lived in a world that was awash in homophobic sentiment. It was at school, it was at cadets, it was everywhere. Thirty years ago when I went up the street in Devonport or Launceston or Hobart I'd get abused. I was very well aware it was not just for my environmental outspokenness, but for the fact that I was gay. Now I see an occasional person look a bit cranky, but people come up and say thank you for being there for the past 30 or 40 years.

Kerry O'Brien: I have memories of a sense of communalism in our street: neighbours knew each other, neighbours helped each other, neighbours were concerned about each other. But we all eyed off the guy around the corner who was living in what Catholics called a mixed marriage, because he had previously been married Catholic, been divorced and excommunicated and was living in sin with another—probably perfectly fine—woman. When an Air Force man returned from Malaysia in the very early '60s with his Malaysian bride—I couldn't remember a single instance where I could recall seeing anybody in our neighbourhood speak to that woman. There was no sense of malice about it; it was that she was different, she wasn't one of us.

Julian Burnside: I grew up in Melbourne in the 1950s and I remember the response to the large numbers of Italian and Greek refugees who were coming into Australia then. They were called eyeties and wogs and reffos and DPs. And they were scorned for reasons that are horribly familiar now. Their women dressed in black from head to foot. They were too religious. They had too many children. They ate weird food. I remember when it was weird to have froth on the top of your coffee. They ate squid, and that was repulsive. All of that has shifted but it's only shifted because we have a new group to target.

ON RECONCILIATION WITH INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIA

Bob Brown: For all of us non-Aboriginal people, we need to emulate what's happened in other countries and establish a place where we can go and see the truth about what happened to the Aboriginal people—and is happening to the Aboriginal people. One of my ventures in the next year or two is to set up a 'truth house'. It'll have to be private enterprise because government won't take it on. We need to do it independently so that we can come to grips with the horror of what happened to the first Australians ... and why there is still such racism against Aboriginal people in Australia.

Julian Burnside: If we had any political leaders in the country, we would have someone saying: 'Here is an idea for reconciling ourselves with our Indigenous history, it's going to take one or two generations to fix, but we will do it.' Instead we get people who just want to get votes, who look no further than the three-year political horizon.

Kerry O'Brien: Any Australian who does not know the fundamentals of what white settlement did to Aboriginal civilisation is either thicker than two planks, can't read or is just a bigot who can't see past their nose. Have a museum, have records that confront people with the past, by all means. But those things are not going to solve the problems of dysfunctional Aboriginal communities. The solutions are only going to be found with the active cooperation and partnership and leadership from Indigenous Australians themselves and from those communities.

ON LEADERSHIP ON HUMAN RIGHTS

Kerry O'Brien: When you look at Australia's human rights record, there have been times in our history that reflect a disconnect. Post-war, you had Doc Evatt and others right at the forefront of the United Nations and big headline human rights issues. At the same time, the Australian immigration department was screening displaced persons from Europe ... and they were asked among other things whether they were of pure European origin. This was not to identify Jews to enhance the process of getting them to Australia. This was to prevent them from coming to Australia. At the heart of an important government department you had that, juxtaposed against what Doc Evatt was doing on the world stage.

Julian Burnside: The Labor Party last year in its national conference decided to imitate the Coalition policy on boat people because one of their members said it would be political suicide to take a soft line on boats. They do exactly as much bad as the Coalition but they wring their hands whilst they do it. That's not leadership, that's pathetic. I sometimes think that if Barry Jones was today running a campaign against capital punishment, right now most senior politicians in Australia would support the existence of capital punishment. Why? Because they would think there were some votes in maintaining a moral horror.

Bob Brown: The problem here is that five per cent of people change the world and you need leadership to do that, and in the big parties we don't have and haven't had that leadership for a long time. We've got venal, very strong, aggressive people who do what the big corporations want them to do. We keep hearing about bipartisanship ... we're a mono-party, with very little difference between the two old parties. And that's because the Labor party has lost its social justice priority of the past and both parties are in the clutches of a huge corporate lobby.

Listen to the full discussion A Tamar Valley Writers Festival panel considers the question: Advance Australia where?

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