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Speaking Up For A Department of Peace

I was invited to speak at the recent World Peace Forum in Canada, and it is with great pleasure that I show you my small contribution to this movement.

" I would like to thank the organisers who arranged this forum and invited me here today. I would also like to thank Biannca Pace, of the Australian Ministry of Peace who originally alerted me to this worldwide movement.

My job is to give ideas on how a State legislator in Australia can create a Department of Peace and have an input into a world situation.

It is true that leadership comes from the top, but it also true that those at the top are limited by the conceptual understanding of those who elect him or her, and the media that communicates or does not communicate his or her message. Increasingly, a clique of powerful people seems to shape the alternatives that lead to the election of a person, who is portrayed as the better of only two options for the currently important paradigms. It may be that truly great leaders can step thought the clutter of this, but perhaps only leaders who are personally tested in impossible situations can really have the credibility and stature to do this. Mahatma Ghandi of India, Nelson Mandela of South Africa and Ann San Suu Kyi of Burma come to mind.

For the rest of the time there is a struggle between what the people need and what the powerful would choose to give them, and of late the balance seems to have shifted in the direction of the powerful. The media have increasing power. They choose the stories that set what is important for those who judge the candidates. Politicians seem to have taken a leaf out of the tobacco industry's book. Faced with an unpleasant truth, no matter how obvious they, 'refuse to accept that'. They then call the truth 'controversial' and act as if the denial is just as possible, so that the lie is given equal status. They then 'tough it out' to show their political machismo.

Liars 1, Truth Nil.

I note that John Howard recently visited Canada and was unusually feted. The US President flattered him as a 'man of steel'. Not all of us in Australia were delighted about this. He followed the USA uncritically into the war in Iraq, despite the largest demonstrations since the Vietnam War against it, and polls that showed over 75% of Australians did not want to go. He refused even to debate the issue in Federal Parliament. He is far less concerned about the dictatorship in Burma, where the Chinese are negotiating very favourably with the collapsing but brutal regime. He has changed our uranium policy to export large amounts to China and India. He has criticised UN inspectors who have looked at conditions in our privatised refugee camps, where people fleeing genocide and their children are interned indefinitely, and there is well-documented high incidence of mental illness. Faced with criticism, he is now trying to get all refugees processed offshore and has asked the Indonesians help with our 'border protection'. The latest group of refugees are Melanesians fleeing Indonesian action in West Papua. Even his conservative party is rebelling.

Domestically John Howard has changed the industrial relations system to strip away a century of award conditions and the lowest paid now negotiate directly with their employers on a 'take it of leave it basis'. The lowest-paid wages are falling in consequence. Some of us have noticed that the pattern of Howard's decisions is always to give the powerful what they want against the non-powerful; Steel with clay feet. Some Australians think the response of the Irish to Howard's visit was more realistic than the North American one. Many of the members of Parliament refused to meet him and turned their backs.

In Friday's (23/6/06) Globe and Mail there was a well-written article on East Timor, asking if it was a failed State? While Australia's peace keepers have done a good job there twice, it has been less noted that just before East Timorese independence, our government did a deal with the Indonesians over oil and gas in the Timor sea. The new East Timorese government wanted a renegotiation of this and even took the matter to the International Court. A compromise deal was negotiated with Australia, but it was for less money than they might have got, and it was years later. The fledgling East Timor government was not helped by a lack of cash to pay wages and rebuild infrastructure. Peace relates to economics as well as politics.

International politics sets the tone for domestic ones. After the Second World War Australia took more migrants proportional to its population than any other nation of earth and did so with virtually no racial strife. The racial stereotypes now being created by our involvement in the Middle East wars are having a bad effect on domestic harmony in Australia. At a recent seminar to look at race relations after a beach riot, my heart sank to hear the stories from teenagers who were born in Australia of Middle Eastern parents. They thought they were happy normal Australians, growing up like any Australian kids, but now are told, 'Go back to where you came from'.

'What do you say?' they ask, 'When you come from here?"

The ramifications are in the schoolyards and in the suburbs.

I do not introduce this material to be needlessly negative, nor to disparage my country, but we must recognise that democracy means that the government derives its legitimacy from its people, and must do their will. My own slight modification of this is that a leader should do what the people 30 years hence will have wanted him or her to have done. We must increase the number of people who look 30 years ahead and see the consequences of what is done now.

My own background is in medicine. I am a surgeon by training, but graduated to preventive health. In the health system, most of the money is spent in the last few months of life, as a rather cost-ineffective pre-funeral expense. We need better preventive health, vaccinations, tobacco and pollution control, safer workplaces, sex education etc. This would give us more years of life, for less money. By analogy there would be a lot less wars if we were better at managing the peace.

To continue medical analogies, the human emergency response is termed 'fight or flight' response. If we are so frightened that the only question is 'do we fight or fly'? So we will vote very differently than if the question is 'How do we build a better society?'

Some years ago on a plane from New Zealand to Australia I sat beside a woman who was having a lot of trouble selling domestic security systems to New Zealanders. 'Well, I said sympathetically, I guess they just don't have a security problem'. She said, 'Oh yes they do, they just don't realise it yet- they are not scared enough'. Charming as she may have looked, she was in the business of selling fear, and turning it into cash. The armaments industry in miniature.

In Parliament there are a lot of people who are in the business of selling fear for votes. At a domestic level this is fear of crime, but when a 'fight or flight' situation exists in the population's mind, this becomes fear of difference.

Kids are brought up on games where the object is to shoot as many baddies as possible. As long as they are baddies, it is OK to shoot them. It's the game. Now we hear words like 'terrorist' and phrases 'war on terror'. The enemy are defined as beyond any possibility of non-hostile interaction; it's 'fight or flight' stuff. 'Kill or be killed'.

At a domestic level the 'law and order' brigade rack up penalties for all crimes and spending more and more on gaols. Recently a Government minder asked for my support to rack up the penalty for some crime that was scandalising the 'shock jocks' of talk back radio. I asked, 'And I presume that you will be giving me evidence that this will improve the crime rate?' She replied, politically enough, 'No I won't, but I understand that that is the government's position'.

I have a friend who was high in the prison system. Her opinion was, 'Let two-thirds of them out immediately, but support them with education, housing and jobs. Lock up about a third of them forever, as you will never reform them, they are too far gone'. I think she is right about the two-thirds and she may be right about the other third, but if so, we must ask what sort of conditioning led them to that situation, and what can be done in childcare.

Another inquiry I was involved in was deciding what to do about 'Children at risk of learning difficulties'. The bottom line was that they need to be identified early. Infants get lost for several years between when the health system supervises their birth to when the education system starts their schooling. If the family is dysfunctional with domestic violence, drug and alcohol, mental illness, or just plain lack of parenting skills, quite a lot of harm can be done before the situation is recognised. The old Jesuit adage is 'give me a boy till he is seven and I will show you the man'. The state of children's minds tends to be ignored in a economic rationalist environment because if they are too small and weak to cause trouble, why spent money on them or their families?

We have to go beyond just crime and punishment. An excellent Australian programme of 'restorative justice ' looks at ways that interactions can be structured so that the assumption is beyond merely crime and retribution. It was pioneered as a difference way of policing where the criminal was dealt with in the way that would be more likely to restore justice and make a repetition of the situation less likely in future. But these concepts can be taught in the education system. It can be used in schools to lessen bullying. The kids take responsibility for discipline and justice in school playgrounds. It is being introduced into Australian schools and, as was said at this conference, some Canadian ones.

So the question becomes how does the Department of Community Services tactfully help parents with problems produce good child nurturing that can give all kids an even start. How does the Education department use restorative justice to fix bullying in the playground, to make less work for the Police. How do we get people with mental illness or drug and alcohol problems to end up in the Health system rather than the Justice system, and how do we get the Prisons to spend a much bigger part of their budget on education and rehabilitation. We need graded community and housing support for people with problems, and this will be paid for by the lessening in the number of institutional beds required in prisons, hospitals and nursing homes.

Preventive social policy spans a lot of departments. So that is why we are looking for a Department of Peace at a State level to coordinate a new way of looking at things.

It is not even all that new an idea. Departments of the Environment were created that deal with issued that impinge on other departments, Mining, Agriculture, Manufacturing, Fishing, Property Development and Planning. In an increasingly complex society we needed a repository of environmental knowledge that could advocate it within the political process.

A Department of Peace would simply be one that promoted social capital and harmony, and as such lessened the costs of discord and crime. Discord and unhappiness costs a lot in drug abuse, violence, crime, the justice system, the prison system and the insurance system. But there is also the reduction in human possibilities. Every management textbook you ever read tells you to make good decisions as low down the management hierarchy as possible. Stop little problems becoming big problems. Let all kids see the world as a friendly place, let playground bullying be dealt with by the students rather than the teachers. Lets have more prevention and less cure, more home support and less institutions. Lets have a population that isn't scared, and looks beyond 'fight or flight' to what is the best policy for the next 30 years, not the next 7 second sound bite.

And if we do it right at the bottom of our society's management structure, we won't tolerate them getting it so wrong at the top. This is not radical stuff. It's common sense really."

Yours,
Dr.Arthur Chesterfield-Evans M.L.C.(ACE)