“Our public events should reflect a common Australian purpose, not one that divides, not one that seeks to prefer one part of the community to others,” writes columnist HUGH SELBY.

The fate of the world economy and the lives of an untold number (including ours and our children) depend upon the charlatans who have control of the White House and can direct the US Armed Forces to send imaginary enemies back to the Stone Age.

Like Nero they fiddle, but make a lavish new ballroom, while the world burns around them.

The chief charlatan, the orange clown Donnie, has common purpose with Vlad aka Vladimir Vladimirovich, and Bibi aka Binyamin, in using others to slay ever more innocents. They share a moral bucket, one with an unfixable hole that drips blood, but they sleep in comfort and take no personal risks.

I hear the laugh of the damned when there are calls that Black or Palestinian or Ukrainian or starving African lives matter because they don’t, not at all, not to them and those of their ilk.

Shooting people near their homes in Minneapolis, using drones to take out Ukrainians, having human remains mix with the post-missile concrete dust in Gaza or Lebanon – all done with nary a thought for the dead, but only, “How invincible am I?”.

The prevalence of these events destroys common humanity.

There’s a timeless saying: “Home is… where they have to take you in”. It’s attributed to the American poet, Robert Frost.

Somebody needs to tell our little Albo about it so that he relearns the simple point that those misguided Australians and their overseas-born children now in the camps in Syria have a right to expect our help to come home.

Many of us have moved on from the notion that the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children and later generations. 

Yet, alas, the fate of the fathers and mothers afflicts the children, and not just those who were duped into joining the Caliphate. 

We need a unifying, not divisive voice

Indigenous Australians are over-represented in our prisons and youth detention centres. Their health profiles too remain poor. 

So much money has been spent, so many words spoken and written, but the reported results are bad.

What needs to be done to achieve general good health, and “lives that do matter” contributing to, rather than being locked away from, their families and communities?

If the answer is known it is not being shared.

Meanwhile, our national government commits to spending billions on pointless nuclear submarines to benefit the American and British arms industries, while rabbits, mice, mites and venomous frogs cause havoc to our agriculture and native fauna, we have an ever growing housing crisis, and the funding on research and training is far too little. 

The big issues facing this country do not come from pretending that we are a world power in waiting. We are a quarry and a food supplier. Those in need of what we produce will ensure that the shipping lanes remain open.

The big issues are home grown. They are about quality outcomes in health, housing, education for those already here and those who come to join us.

There is also the issue of our national identity. We are not an occupied colony, so why do we have a colonial flag and a foreign head of state?

But our daily fare of what’s presented as important, as typified recently, is homophobic comments by immature sportspeople on the field, a defamation action among female actors, crude remarks at Anzac Day dawn services, and cancelling speakers at public events who might say something that smacks of incorrectness: that is, controversial.

This daily fare shows a reluctance, perhaps an inability, to confront big issues, the issues that don’t lend themselves to short sound bites, but require research, promoting and defending viewpoints, forming a plan that will have a life well beyond the election cycle.

We have people capable of finding and delivering the solutions if and only if we give them the opportunity.

The failure of the referendum to make us independent, to have one of our own as head of state, left us relying upon the vestiges of a UK tourist attraction, one that has lost much of its glitter in the years since.

The void was filled by giving the descendants of the indigenous (now a tiny minority of our population) a recognition disproportionate to their contribution.

Because indigenous people served and serve in Australian forces, and their forebears fought the colonisers and gave their lives to that cause, there are compelling reasons for a Welcome to Country to be part of Anzac remembrance. 

But it does not follow from that recognition that our daily lives and any public event (including news programs) must be started by reminders of what tribe may once have dominated a particular geographical area, or a Welcome to Country.

Every group within our multicultural nation should be able to express its uniqueness when appropriate, which is mostly to its own members.

However, for the most part our public events should reflect a common Australian purpose, not one that divides, not one that seeks to prefer one part of the community to others.

We need to find our unifying voice.

Hugh Selby is a CityNews columnist.