When you go to Parliament you don’t leave your soul or your heart at the door, or at least you shouldn’t if people are to have any reliance on your empathy or capacity to understand. Different situations are seen by different people differently by reason of their individual personal experience.

 

The vast majority of Australians support strong borders which provide for the government to control who is allowed in and who isn't.

 

However, these issues should not let us abscond from the fact that compassion and strength are not opposing but complementary virtues of a great nation.

 

The media has made much of Joe Hockey's call for compassion and humanity with reference to the costs of conducting funerals of those killed in the asylum seeker boat tragedy last year, and paying for their families to attend the funerals.

 

Joe Hockey takes to this debate his own family's experience. Joe is of Armenian descent. These people were massacred by the Turkish government during and just after World War I, though the circumstances around this incident remain hotly debated even today. It is estimated that between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians were killed or perished in the 20^th century’s first holocaust.

 

Joe's father emigrated to Australia after their family made it to Lebanon. Now obviously Joe has the thought and the spirit of the family trials and tribulations that make up a substantial part of his character. If Joe's family ghosts and forebears were watching him at his press conferences they would clearly be saying consider carefully what you say next, remember the horrors that our people have been through.

 

I would have personally felt much less of Joe if he said anything else than he did say.

 

Now the dilemma is that there are other people with equally strong views held in the other direction. Sometimes these people may be the descendants of families who have suffered great losses in the defence of our nation. Understandably, this experience makes some express views of a different ilk.

 

But whatever is in the ingredients of a person's character, if it is truly held and not contrived then you must respect it.

 

What I dislike in our political system is that we expect and sometimes demand that on every issue the deeper essences of the personality must be neutered at the altar of party uniformity and solidarity.

 

In today's media environment, if a politician dares speak their mind, they are branded as a "renegade", a "maverick", "divisive", or the harbinger of imminent collapse. One that really annoys me, because it is often attached to my name, is "outspoken".

 

This is the dilemma of the balancing mechanism between being outspoken and being automaton I suppose.

 

The person you think less of in politics is not the person you disagree with, it is the person that has become a philosophical mercenary, the soldier of his self-fortune. The person who is prepared to compromise anything he believes in for the purposes of getting ahead.

 

Now I believe that we should deliver strong borders and I believe that the majority of Australians agree with that. We should be compassionate to those in need to the capacity that we able to do so, but we must be in honest about that capacity. By necessity, compassion must have limits. We are a comparably wealthy nation, but we do not have a limitless supply of funds, or more to the point taxes, to spend on every issue which may be of itself a worthwhile cause.

 

Our job in politics should be as much as possible to deliver the outcomes that accord with the values of the vast majority of Australians. However, the day you do this by completely prostituting your own beliefs, is the day you become a very dangerous person.

 

If I am a person without empathy, a person that is not affected by the experiences in my family's life, a person who is not affected by my own personal experiences of life, then I have no hope of having any empathy with you. And when you and I disagree and I am in a position of power over you, you are in danger.

 

When you go to Parliament you don’t leave your soul or your heart at the door, or at least you shouldn’t if people are to have any reliance on your empathy or capacity to understand. Different situations are seen by different people differently by reason of their individual personal experience.

 

The vast majority of Australians support strong borders which provide for the government to control who is allowed in and who isn't.

 

However, these issues should not let us abscond from the fact that compassion and strength are not opposing but complementary virtues of a great nation.

 

The media has made much of Joe Hockey's call for compassion and humanity with reference to the costs of conducting funerals of those killed in the asylum seeker boat tragedy last year, and paying for their families to attend the funerals.

 

Joe Hockey takes to this debate his own family's experience. Joe is of Armenian descent. These people were massacred by the Turkish government during and just after World War I, though the circumstances around this incident remain hotly debated even today. It is estimated that between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians were killed or perished in the 20^th century’s first holocaust.

 

Joe's father emigrated to Australia after their family made it to Lebanon. Now obviously Joe has the thought and the spirit of the family trials and tribulations that make up a substantial part of his character. If Joe's family ghosts and forebears were watching him at his press conferences they would clearly be saying consider carefully what you say next, remember the horrors that our people have been through.

 

I would have personally felt much less of Joe if he said anything else than he did say.

 

Now the dilemma is that there are other people with equally strong views held in the other direction. Sometimes these people may be the descendants of families who have suffered great losses in the defence of our nation. Understandably, this experience makes some express views of a different ilk.

 

But whatever is in the ingredients of a person's character, if it is truly held and not contrived then you must respect it.

 

What I dislike in our political system is that we expect and sometimes demand that on every issue the deeper essences of the personality must be neutered at the altar of party uniformity and solidarity.

 

In today's media environment, if a politician dares speak their mind, they are branded as a "renegade", a "maverick", "divisive", or the harbinger of imminent collapse. One that really annoys me, because it is often attached to my name, is "outspoken".

 

This is the dilemma of the balancing mechanism between being outspoken and being automaton I suppose.

 

The person you think less of in politics is not the person you disagree with, it is the person that has become a philosophical mercenary, the soldier of his self-fortune. The person who is prepared to compromise anything he believes in for the purposes of getting ahead.

 

Now I believe that we should deliver strong borders and I believe that the majority of Australians agree with that. We should be compassionate to those in need to the capacity that we able to do so, but we must be in honest about that capacity. By necessity, compassion must have limits. We are a comparably wealthy nation, but we do not have a limitless supply of funds, or more to the point taxes, to spend on every issue which may be of itself a worthwhile cause.

 

Our job in politics should be as much as possible to deliver the outcomes that accord with the values of the vast majority of Australians. However, the day you do this by completely prostituting your own beliefs, is the day you become a very dangerous person.

 

If I am a person without empathy, a person that is not affected by the experiences in my family's life, a person who is not affected by my own personal experiences of life, then I have no hope of having any empathy with you. And when you and I disagree and I am in a

position of power over you, you are in danger.

 

What you should want from your politicians is a person who does not parrot the line on their blackberry delivered by the generic media adviser. You don't want the person that earnestly displays views to the camera just because they are the views earnestly held by a polling company. What you want is a human being, they're the only people you can talk to. 

 

 

 

 

What you should want from your politicians is a person who does not parrot the line on their blackberry delivered by the generic media adviser. You don't want the person that earnestly displays views to the camera just because they are the views earnestly held by a polling company. What you want is a human being, they're the only people you can talk to.