FRED NILE AND THE INSPIRATION-PORN TRADE

I've just witnessed yet another rabid report on the tele featuring the evil Fred Nile and his mean-spirited refusal to recognise the bravery of the Lindt siege victims. While certain of his comments may have incensed some, Fred does raise an interesting philosophical question, at least for moi.

First let me say that I don’t know Fred. I have never met him, though I have seen him from time to time while making my way through the corridors of Parliament House. I don’t always agree with Fred's staunchly conservative view of the world, though I do agree a surprising amount of the time, as I suspect does an equally surprising percentage of the Australian community.

That said I was shocked by reports of some of the things Fred is quoted as saying with regard to the actions, or more precisely the apparent inactions of some of the Lindt siege victims. However, I have some small experience of dealing with a media that’s looking for a head to pike and I know from personal experience just how easy it is to walk headlong and hapless into the “are you still beating your wife” style of interrogation Fred has recently found himself facing from journalists in search of that Holy Grail of journalism, the self-perpetuating headline.

Journalism 101: when driving a hate campaign always choose a
picture guaranteed to nourish the public's disdain of your victim

For these reasons I am not as cynical as some when it comes to Fred’s claim that it was nothing more than a linguistic slip of the tongue that caused him to suggest the only man in the Lindt cafe that demonstrated any bravery on that fateful day was the man with the gun. I can accept that it was nothing more than a clumsy faux pas; that what he'd meant to say was “the only man in the Lindt cafe that demonstrated any bravery that day was the man who wrestled with the gun”, meaning cafe manager Tori Johnson.

In my opinion this is a very minor and entirely reasonable concession to offer Fred, under the circumstances.

All that aside, we are still left with the question of whether or not the victims of the siege qualify for bravery awards, and in fact whether it is legitimate to associate victim-hood and mere survival with bravery at all?

Surely there is no bravery intrinsic to falling victim to some violent act or tragic circumstance? Under certain conditions it is possible to demonstrate bravery in one's actions as a result of, or even after such an event, but is there anything genuinely brave involved in being at the wrong place at the wrong time and passively awaiting rescue?

Is it brave, for instance, to be knocked down by a hit & run driver and being left laying on the road?

Should the victims and survivors of the Port Arthur massacre be nominated for bravery awards? If so and given it was an outdoors event, how might we go about identifying the geographical boundaries within which people who ducked for cover will qualify as having acted bravely...everyone technically within range of the gunman’s rifle perhaps? Couldn't be more than a few thousand people, surely?

Is it an act of bravery to jump up and down on a beach calling for help while someone drowns in the surf?

For that matter, is it a genuine act of bravery for a child to call an ambulance to his home where his mother lays dying on the floor after a stroke? It is often hailed as bravery by the media, but is doing what one is taught to do in an emergency an act of bravery?

To me at least, bravery and heroism tend to go hand in hand and both generally involve some element of self-sacrifice.  It's bad enough that today's kids worship football players as heroes without the warm-fuzzy set elevating people who flee a crisis in terror to those same dizzying heights of mediocrity.

It is important to objectively consider why sportspersons are so often hailed as heroes these days and when one does, one finds it’s not so much for what they have done that we worship them and hold them up as heroic role models, but rather for what they have not done e.g. not turned to drugs or alcohol as a result of their new-found wealth and privilege, not engaged in drunken hotel romps and associated sexual assault activities, not being filmed in the act of giving a competitor a sly elbow to the face will make you a hero too, as will not turning to a life of crime despite being raised in Redfern.

I think what Fred was trying to say was that which the media now insists we recognise as ‘bravery’ the Australian people once considered to be nothing more that their ‘duty’ and in an era when it seems all sense of duty is being stripped from the Aussie ethos; an era where no-one does anything unless there’s something clear and immediate in it for them, it is hardly surprising we might now consider our basic human duties to be noteworthy.

In a recent media release, NSW Greens MLC Dr. John Kaye said Fred's failure to recognise the bravery of the Lindt siege victims amounts to a failure to recognise their suffering and the suffering of their families for years to come. I say the victims of the siege had a duty to survive in order to spare their families the years of anguish Dr. Kaye speaks of and it was this sense of duty, along with the innate human instinct for self-preservation that likely sustained them and perhaps even motivated them to flee the scene at their earliest opportunity.

Duty is something sadly missing in today's society and rebranding it ‘bravery’ in an attempt to manufacture inspiration-porn to nourish a society increasingly driven by a “it’s not my problem” approach to crises seems a strikingly shallow motivational stratagem.

If the powers that be do decide to bestow bravery awards on the survivors of the Lindt siege, where will it all end and what of the equity issues?

For instance, what of the bravery shown by the many children who 'survived' various abuses at the hands of the Christian Brothers over the years, or the thousands of Aboriginal children who 'survived' Australia’s assimilation policies, just to name a few we might want to consider while minting all those shiny medals?

Meanwhile, should it transpire in the fullness of time that reports of Tori Johnson’s bravery and heroism are well founded, I’d be surprised if Fred Nile’s wasn't among the very first nominations for Tori's recognition to hit the Honours Secretariat’s desk!  

Anyway, I’ll get outaya way now...


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