This is a mother of three blogging in Abbott’s Australia on 24 September 2014:
I started this blog to vent my anger at the Abbott government. To keep myself sane. To mitigate against the real likelihood of alienating myself from polite company. And to share my thoughts with like-minded Australians in online communities, many of whom are speechless with horror at what we are becoming and grateful for the support in putting that horror into words.
There are many brain-dumps on here. Some are mocking, some are furious, or disgusted. I won’t be deleting anything – we still have an implied freedom of political communication in our liberal democracy – but I am changing my style. Sane people change their behaviour when circumstances around them change. As Einstein observed, to do the same thing repeatedly and expect a different outcome amounts to insanity.
What has changed?
I no longer have trust in my own government. I do not feel that it is safe for me to furiously and hastily say what I think of their actions in the way that the press does to the Muslim community. I am afraid that the brain dump approach will attract the attention of a band of heavily armed men with the legal power to use force against me. If I wrote in haste what I really think of the Abbott government and its latest outbreak of oppressive nonsense, I would be afraid for my children. As many Australians know only too well, particularly the Aboriginal community and now the Muslim community, children are deeply traumatised by heavily armed men breaking down your front door and using legal force against innocent civilians. And yes, they are civilians. They are not members of the armed forces of a nation state. And yes, they are innocent. We have the presumption of innocence in this country. You are innocent until proven guilty in a properly constituted court of law. And so am I.
So.
I have decided to try and make sense of events in Australia on 23-24 September 2014 using evidence-based arguments instead. I would rather scribble off an angry rant about the ugly rhetoric and extreme violence being deployed around Australia on the flimsiest – or absence – of evidence. But that is dangerous now. Here is my thinking on the danger: armed agents of the Australian government are persuaded or deluded about the level of threat to Australians, and impervious to their role in increasing that threat. And because they are probably persuaded and likely deluded and definitely impervious, they might accidently mistake a middle-aged mother of three sitting at her computer for a threat to national security……
Read the rest here.
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