The War That Came Home

Three years ago, on the 7th of October, 2023, the world watched in horror as Hamas attacked Israel.

Around 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage.

What followed was a war that devastated Gaza, traumatised Israel and sent shock waves far beyond the Middle East.

At the time, I wondered whether October 7 might prove to be more than another terrible chapter in the long and bloody history of that region.

I feared it might become a fuse. Sadly, I was right to be afraid.

But I was looking in the wrong direction.

I was looking at the Middle East.

I should have been looking closer to home.

There is something increasingly sad about watching the police in Britain and Australia become involved in stuff that once would not have been considered police business.

People being arrested, investigated or otherwise subjected to police attention for words such as “muppet” may sound almost comic. It isn't.

It matters because policing depends upon something more important than the power to arrest. It depends upon public confidence that the person wearing the uniform understands the difference between crime and annoyance, danger and offence, disorder and mere disagreement.

I was a cop for over 30 years. I ended up resigning because I couldn't cope with the way things were going.

Most of my time was served in the Aussie Outback. I loved it. I lived in places many only dream about and I met people who made me proud to be part of their lives. And I like to think that they felt the same about me. We were on the same side. If some old bugger got drunk, we locked him up for the night to sober up and my missus cooked him brekkie the next morning and we sent him off with his tail between his legs and a hangover. But with a full belly.

He had been a nuisance. He had not been an enemy of the state. We all knew the difference.

I want to talk to you about something rather more important than a four-letter word.

On the face of it, this is a story about a woman who felt insulted and discriminated against in the country she had adopted as her own.

But I think there is something much deeper going on here.

It concerns an Australian telling another Australian to “piss off” ... and a court deciding that, in the circumstances in which it was said, those words amounted to racial discrimination.

That raises a rather awkward question.

What happens when an expression that is ordinary, familiar and deeply embedded in Australian vernacular is taken out of the culture in which it is used and examined through an entirely different lens?

Because piss off is not, to most Australians, a racial expression.