People should not be responding to bigoted ugliness with any ugliness of their own.
We know that a large majority of the Australian society is extremely comfortable with a multicultural society, that we accept that living in a democracy means having a freedom to practise your religion within the limits of the law.
If anyone has engaged unlawful activity, they should be held to account with the full force of the law.
We have a natural constant craving for leadership. Democracy is always a fragile and imperfect achievement. Yet a distinct feeling of malaise in our political culture lingers. There is something missing from our public debates.
People have a right to protest peacefully, but there's absolutely no excuse for anyone to be conducting a campaign of intimidation that may be directed at anyone because of their religion or because of their background.
Anti-Muslim protests represent a fringe of our society that's seeking to promote hatred and division.
You can protest, you can protest peacefully, but keep things civil.
No-one wants to see violence of any kind on our streets, certainly not any violence that's justified by extreme nationalist ideas or that targets people because of their religion.
There are many in public life who deserve only our praise and admiration. But there are too many who are products of a class that knows little other than spin and the machinations of politics. Little wonder that leadership of the transforming sort is so hard to come by. The danger is that this may be permanent. Where our best people shun politics because the profession isn't honoured as it once was, this only serves to make the profession even less honoured.
I'm not so sure liberal democracy as we know it has reached its terminus. It's clear though, that many have genuinely lost confidence in the Australian political class. One reason is that we like to place enormous burdens of expectations on modern political leaders. To be sure such expectations aren't always honest. Just as we want better public services but object to paying the higher taxes that would make them possible, we often want leadership but only if there aren't hard choices with real consequences.
