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White Knight: Civilisations rise and fall. Politicians come and go. In the end, it's our own personal goodness, or the lack of it, and the example we become for those around us and those after us, which is a far more influential legacy than any political or military victories we ever achieve.
If you really want to change the world you could start by changing yourself. You could get rid of half that anger and resentment you're carrying around for a start.
(Addresses Crowd) Look you can't change the underlying nature of any culture through dissent, resistance, terrorism or any other of those political processes.
The Black Knight (gestures) is quite simply wrong.
Christ, Buddha and any number of the great teachers throughout history realised it. Which is why, much to the chagrin of many of their contemporaries, most of them never took overtly political stances. They all knew that the real challenge for those who seek to change humanity is to transform the inner life of the individuals that comprise it's populations.
The culture of the Western World only really began to achieve Tolerance, Justice, Equality and Liberty, not when legislators decreed it or revolutionaries demanded it, but when the individuals that formed it's civil societies were themselves transformed enough to respect those values.
(To Dark Knight ) You want to change the World, Pal? It 's what we hand onto our own kids in the way of personal values and beliefs that does that; because, in the end, that's the only thing that really endures. If you spent a bit more time at home instead of out on the road over the years you might have understood that.
(To crowd) Australians have all these terms that we throw around to describe ourselves. We do it constantly and two of the most abused and overused are the terms, 'Fair Dinkum' and 'True Blue'.
Regardless of how they're often used, they don't actually mean the same thing. In the Australian vernacular, to be 'Fair Dinkum' is to be honest. To be 'True Blue' is to have integrity; to stand up for what you say you believe in when 'push comes to shove' and it's going to cost you something.
Both terms would, by all accounts, have been applicable to Bob Scott. He was a successful businessman ( looks at Dark Knight) in the area around Wellington, but he was also renowned as a man of honour and principle, a man whose word was his bond. The presentation of The annual Robert Scott Memorial Award is testament to the regard in which he was held by all his community.
(To Crowd) I never met Bob, but I was at an auto spare parts conference (What a place to get a story about Honesty and Integrity:):)) when I saw his sons, Peter and Ian, stand up and get stuck into that industry over it's reputation for a lack of integrity in the way it did business; and in doing so they told this story about their Dad....
Dark Knight: Honesty!!! Are you trying to claim that Honesty has any credibility as a core Australian value in business or anywhere else any more!!. Tell that to James Hardie, Mate!!!.
Honesty and Integrity are part of our shared Australian culture? (laughs)
Well, explain to me why 56% of Australians surveyed in a recent Newspoll said they didn't care if The Prime Minister had lied to them over The Tampa, The War In Iraq or anything else as long as they got the outcomes they wanted on Border protection; as long as interest rates stayed low and their personal prosperity wasn't threatened.
Liars have always claimed that the end justifies the means. People of moral principle are supposed to reject that outright. But Australians and Americans have just ratified it as the principle on which they voted.
You want to tell me that personal virtue can change the world. That our internal spiritual lives can lead us to some kind of National Redemption. Well, let me tell you. In the face of overwhelming Systemic Greed and Injustice. Personal virtues like Honesty, Integrity, Self Reliance or Initiative count for nothing.
You ought to read a little more History, Pal....
To whit...
(To Crowd) There used to be Cannery in Eden. It was run by Heinz Watties. It got into big financial trouble in the early 90's..
So the locals formed a group called the Workers of Greenseas. They came up with an idea for a range of flavoured tuna products that became so phenomenally successful for Heinz that it turned the cannery around to the point that they were turning a profit of $8 million dollars a year.
You might know the product. It was called 'Tastetempters'
By 1999 that cannery was processing about 4,500 tonnes of product each year; not big by world standards but it was more than enough to support the coastal village and to be a shining example of how, with innovation and dedication, Australians could hold their own in a changing world.
But was that good enough for Heinz? No, they closed it down anyway, sacked the workers who had come up with the 'Tastetempters' idea and then moved the whole 'shabang' to Thailand where they could pay 'slave labour' rates.
Why? Because while our workers were being unpaid entreprueners to save their jobs; our idiot politicians were signing all these free trade agreement that made it possible fo Heinz to do all that and then ship the product back here to sell in the Australian market.
In Eden, one in every eight workers lost their jobs.
(To White Knight) Integrity and Honour in Business. Give me break!
All this Globalisation the 'Economic Irrationals' on your side of politics are so in love with is just an excuse for multinationals to return to their 'robber baron' days; and to get access to labour under conditions that the civilised world abolished a century ago.
White Knight: You know for a radical.... you're pretty damned frightened of change. It's not a great strength in someone who wants be a revolutionary. I can just hear Trotsky saying to Lenin "I don't know, Vlad. maybe we should keep the Tsar. We don't want to upset anybody too much...."
Yes, there are always distortions like the one you mention that occur when things change. And there's no doubt about it....the world is going through enormous changes at the moment.....but they're necessary ones.
Without Globalisation there is no hope that the poor countries of the world will ever develop. It is the free flow of capital into the underdeveloped nations of the world that will allow the poor, that you're always going on about, to eventually have some hope of a better life.
Look, for hundreds of years, the world's been like a fish tank with a pane of glass dividing it in half. One side is full of water. One side has almost none. Globalisation is like pulling out the dividing glass. The water rushes from one side to the other. There are points of turbulence, things get washed away... but these are temporary distortions and, in the end, the resources end up equally distributed and the poor are far, far better off.
And, yes, I know what you're going to say.... that what is really happening is that multinationals are using the cheap wages of the developing world to depress workers conditions in The West.
Yes, that will happen.... for a while... but eventually labour will start to organise in Asia. Unions will develop.
The worst excesses of Western companies will be curbed by regulation, just as they were in the West and, as living conditions rise and the cost of manufacturing increases in the Third World, work will flow back to the US and to Australia again...... and when the upheaval has run it's course, everyone will be better off as a result of a vast increase in world economic growth.
And it's not as if you can blame the Coalition for it either. It was bloody Keating, one of your precious 'true believers', that was the mastermind of all the economic deregulation ....and the GST too, now that I come think of it. Or have you forgotten option B.
Look, as much as I hate to say anything good about Keating, if he hadn't deregulated Australia's economy in the 90's, regardless of all pain it caused, we'd have been in a shitload of trouble now.
O.K. He might have started it...But it was John Howard and the Coalition that had the guts to finish it. To do the things that the Labour Party would never have let Keating do. The reform of the wharves and the building industry and all the rest of it...
The days of union strongmen dominating our economy; and their thugs on building sites standing over decent people trying to contribute this country, are gone. Your 'Golden Age of Unionism' dissappeared with the Soviet Union, Pal. Get used to it.
You know what your problem is. You're one of those people who think the world used to be better in the 'good old days.' And your attachment to the past blinds you to the opportunities of the future.
You look backwards instead of forwards. All dinosaurs do. It's a recipe for extinction, Pal.
Dark Knight: Children eh? (Parodies the last line of the song) "I'll be looking to our children for hope" Where are you gonna look, mate? On the kiddie porn sites that your newly globalised Australian Entrepreneurs who are looking for those 'opportunities of the future', have been running on the Internet.
So loving our children and raising them properly is the key to the future, is it?. You've been spinning us this line for years. In songs like " Welcome Here" , "Margaret and Joe" , "Good morning Josie" & "Daddy I can Fly"
Surely you don't still believe that stuff. ... surely you're not going to tell me that Respect for children is still a core Australian value.
Yeah sure, Australians are passionate about the way we raise children...Just as long as they're white, Australian and Middle Class. If they're poor, homeless, abused and Moslem... it's an entirely diffrent matter.
What hypocrisy!
(To Crowd) And..it couldn't have been more obvious that while 75% of Australians were screaming for the resignation of the Governor General on the basis that he had somehow failed to protect children under his care some 72% were simultaneously supporting, even demanding, the indefinite imprisonment of hundreds of children in draconian conditions in our refugee detention centres.
Children.... imprisoned without trial; without access to law or even the basic standards of child protection that we demand for our own kids. Children.... locked up in dreadful conditions on Nauru and in Woomera; witnessing terrible acts of violence and self harm, Children left in such conditions; some for periods of more than 4 years.
I played in those Detention Camps camps in 2001. They were places that would have been unthinkable in this country 20 years ago. Places where Habeas Corpus had been completely abrogated.
But (to White Knight), like you, Mate, most Australians couldn't give a damn. You claim that we're a Christian culture. And you tell me that our future depends on passing on decent values to our kids.
I think it's about time you re-read your own mythology, Mate.
Because you choose to casually ignore the fact that the whole Christian story actually starts with the flight of modern history's first refugee family.
And you can thank God that the Egyptians didn't have Amanda Vanstone in charge at the time..... or their story, and yours, might have had a very different outcome.
White Knight: Very emotive ...and that's the problem with your whole approach to this issue . It's being run on emotion, but you're manipulating the truth again and you know it.
The truth is that Australians have always supported and given sanctuary to refugees. We are one of the most successful multicultural societies in the world but.... that's partly because we've controlled the flow of immigrants. We made sure we never had such large numbers at any one time that the social fabric of our nation was threatened. What your suggesting.... the end of mandatory detention... is a recipe for anarchy.
Yes, these people are in a tragic situation... but it is partially one of their own making. And what was the alternative for us? You talk about Habeas Corpus.... which shows how little you know about Law.
The circumstance of Invasion was always ruled as an exception to that legal precedent. It's the circumstance in which P.O.W.s were interred; and make no mistake the activities of the people smugglers in the last ten years was an invasion. What was our alternative? And , bottom line....what we did worked. The boats have stopped coming.
Whether you admit it or not The Howard government has been a record high Immigration Government. That's not an opinion, that's a fact. The numbers are there. 18,000 families last year. Check it out.
You're not happy with the world. That's the bottom line. You want to change it. Well, I'll tell you something, the problem with trying to change the world, is that, in the main, it will not do what it's told.
That last song just shows up for what you are! You're like so many national and international political figures these days who think that by invoking the language of religiosity they can give moral weight to their own faulted political objectives. What you're really trying to do is to co-opt the power of the religious meta-narrative to remake the world, and God, for that matter... in your own image and likeness.
It is! You want to reinvent Christ as some kind of Left Wing revolutionary. Well, he wasn't. I think you're getting him confused with Che Guevara and, let me tell you...the beard was the only similarity.
(To Black Knight) For a Christian you're sounding perilously like a Moslem Fundamentalist. Why?
Because you and your 'Martin Luther King, Jnr. School of Radical Christian Clergy' are all making the same mistake that the Ayatolahs have. That of trying to turn religion into some kind of a political weapon.
And it's not. Religion is a personal, not a political thing.... and everything European History has ever taught us is that ....it's best kept that way. Churches that become politically polarised destroy their sense of community. Faith is supposed to connect us to others not divide us.
There are shining examples of religious communities of all faiths around the world that find that joyous connection to God, and to each other, though Faith. I witnessed it in Adelaide.....(Philip Goodyear and The Adelaide Bell Ringers)
To whit.
Song: Circle of The Bells (hit 'Back' in your browser header' to return to this place in this 3 act version of the script not the 'back to script' link )
Dark Knight: Yeah, you and your God. You keeping thanking him on all your albums. Well, I've got his double set too. Ta daa! (Flourish produces small bible) The Bible Volume 1 & 2! Guess what? He doesn't thank you once.
But I tell you what... (Flips through the pages ) there's some pretty appalling stuff in here. Particularly in (puts on parody of loud authoritative voice) Volume 1:The Old Testament.
(To Crowd) This is George Bush's God of war at His best. On one hand He claims to be the God of all Creation but, on the other, He gives his Arab children to Joshua and the Israelites at Jericho to be put to the sword.
What kind of a callous God would give one half of his children to the other half to be killed. It's pretty revolting. If God really is our father it's time some one reported him to D.O.C.S.
White Knight: (To Dark Knight) So you have judged God and found him to be wanting, have you? You're refusing to participate in his faulted and callous Creation any longer, is that it?
(Sings condescendingly) "Well I could have told you, Vincent.......this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you"
Look Pal, you can beat your breast about the callous nature of creation all you like, but I'm not stupid enough to get drawn into that.
Your problem is that your so 'sold' on the concept of Evolution and the Survival of the Fittest, and all that Darwinian garbage; that you believe that conflict and competition were always part of nature. So you've got no choice but to blame all the bad bits on the Creator! What you can't accept is that these things are actually the product of the reality of Evil in the world.
But you can't accept that...because if you did, then you would have to deal with a theology that included the Devil which is pretty unfashionable among 'Leftie Christians' these days.
Look, I don't have a problem with God's plan. I see ample evidence of His goodness in the world around me and..... I happen to very grateful for the life I've been given.... so I'm going to get on with living it.
I, point blank, refuse to squander one minute of it on Anger, Regret and Guilt... the way you do. You might think God is cruel and callous but the God I know is a God of Love and Celebration.
Dark Knight: Bullshit! Your God is a God of division. I've seen you and you Evangelist buddies in action. You quote Leviticus to attack Gays. You quote Paul to marginalise Women. You quote Revelations to Justify War and Genesis to justify the brutal oppression of the Palestinians. You quote anyone and everything except Christ himself.
Shit no, Because most of what He said was pretty damned left wing.
He kicked the money lenders out of the temple; He said the Rich should give all they own to the poor; He advocated forgiveness and compassion under the Law... not your bloody Right wing, 'Truth in Sentencing', Law And Order codes of practice.
He even stood up against Capital punishment for Christ's sake...well, for the Woman taken in Adultery's sake, anyway....
No wonder the zealots strung him up.
Face it, your religious worldview is very much like theirs was; it's not about Celebration and Worship at all... It's about Exclusion and Division. Your kind of religion is out of control in the States and it's getting a hold here. God help us!
