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The next speaker is a Jesuit priest and a lawyer, which suggests that some lawyers do tell the truth. Father Frank Brennan is a Jesuit priest, a visiting fellow in law at the Australian National University and the University of New South Wales. He was the foundation director of Uniya, a Christian centre for social research and action sponsored by the Australian Jesuits. No one in Australia has done more for the cause of peace, freedom, reconciliation and equality for Aborigines and Islanders than Frank Brennan, and nobody has been more heroic in underwriting, underpinning and building the rights of the East Timorese than Frank Brennan either. He is a personal friend and one of my great heroes. Would you please welcome Father Frank Brennan. Justice Einfeld, ladies and gentlemen, might I join with you in acknowledging the traditional owners of the land where we are. I'm one of those Australians who finds that a little difficult to do unless it's first been done by an Indigenous Australian. I think we've been very privileged here today in word, in dance, and in song to have that acknowledgement made by our Indigenous brothers and sisters. It establishes the point that our relationships lack context and they lack connectedness unless we are here together, no matter what our otherness. That is a very good beginning, as it is for those of us of a religious persuasion to be with someone like Bill, sharing his little bit of heaven with us, and we look forward to his eternal life to come. If we are to take seriously that peace is in our hands, we today need to come back very firmly to the whole notion of relationships, their context and their connectedness. I was at a simple family dinner only on Tuesday night. A 17-year-old niece of mine, who is quite clever with her words, said to her mother, causing great shock, "Well, of course, only the other day you said to me, 'Don't even try, you won't ever get there.'" The mother was very shocked, thinking she could never have said such a thing. It turned out she had said it during a driving lesson while the young niece was heading towards a red light. But that sort of thing can be said only when there is a context of love and of peace. If that context is not there, then those precise words and that precise situation can produce conflict and can destroy peace. I think all of us would acknowledge that we are presently living in a world—our own individual worlds and our world collectively—where relationships are so often fractured and our world of meaning is fractured. Our still point, our centeredness, our other-directedness seems to have become so uncertain, even non-existent, completely ungrounded. Now, of course, some of us can live with hope without a religious perspective. Those of us who do have a religious perspective have to admit we are deeply troubled at the moment in our world, that there are people both in Washington and Iraq who invoke the one God in the justice of their cause and in the hope of their future. This is evidence of how fractured these relationships, even the most fundamental relationships, have become. But even in this audience, I am unapologetic in saying that fracturedness is now even greater because of the uncertainty of our political order. We are entering into a new world order which is so uncertain. It's less than 14 years since the end of the Cold War, the paradigm on which all international organisations were posited. For much of that time, there was a Clinton-Democrat administration in Washington. Now, for the first time since the first Gulf War, we are living in an era when the Republican hawks are putting their shape on what they think that world order might be. So very sadly, all of us need to acknowledge, no matter what our interest or disinterest in politics, that we have entered into a world where it is being said, even by our own political leaders through their actions, that war is no longer the last resort and that the United Nations is no longer the arbiter of justified force in the absence of direct aggression on a member state. For us, these are very troubling times. For us as Australians, they are even more troubling because of the fragility of our own domestic political arrangements. I was very troubled the other day to hear the difference of viewpoint between John Howard and Tony Abbott about whether or not there was an increased risk of terrorism. Why? Because this was the first evidence we had that, unlike the United Kingdom, for example, there has not been sustained debate within our political process before venturing into war, and our politicians therefore have sold us short. But they've been able to sell us short because we sold ourselves short in the first instance. We have become a people as a nation where fear of the other has become a political plus and it's been exploited. And now we are paying that price. So the real challenge for us this day in this audience is not to invent a new international political system overnight, nor to revise our political parties, but it is to concede that if, for example, we compare ourselves with the country next door, New Zealand—which is so similar to us—we have got ourselves into a situation of involvement in a coalition of the willing, which would be absolutely unthinkable in New Zealand. That society has incrementally made different decisions than we have about issues to do with peace, issues to do with deterrence, and issues to do with refugees. This is why I don't want to urge a council of despair, but rather incremental actions of individual and collective hope. We dare to come together today in this context under banners which say that peace is in our hands. Peace can only be in our hands if it is realistically in our hearts and in our minds. What we all have to concede, no matter what our disinterest in politics, is that the pottery vase which used to hold international world peace has now been shattered and a new one is yet to be shaped and designed. That is a task which is our task, and it will require abundant spiritual energy, great personal focus and great collective action. That's why we can truly endorse the sentiment that world peace needs you and that we can be the change that we want to be. Even amongst us, there would be some division about whether or not Australia should be party to this war or whether this war should be. But what is essential for us in this spiritual journey today is to plumb the depths of that shame we experience collectively if we are opposed to this war, or to confront the depths and the enormity of the ambiguity and the darkness we experience if we're undecided, or to acknowledge the regretful righteousness we feel if we think it the only course of action. But there must always be hope. During this last year, each month, I have visited the worst institution designed by a modern Australian government which is truly evil, namely the Woomera Immigration Detention Centre. But even there, I find hope. Recording location: Australia, Sydney, World Peace Forum 2003