During my last post I spoke only briefly about my respect for those who have, rightly or wrongly, fought and died in an effort to defend this country and the culture we have built. Over the decades, men and woman have seen what they believed was a threat to the Australian way of life and have put their lives on the line to defeat this threat. These people were, in my eyes, Heroes. A hero is someone who puts the good of the group before the good of themselves. And so this post is going to be about heroes.

It’s been an interesting few weeks for me. I’ve seen an awful lot of the dead be called heroes and an awful lot of the living be called villains. Now what has been particularly interesting is that in only one of these cases has the title been deserved… and in the other two it’s almost like it should have been reversed.

There’s something I’ve come to notice all to clearly over the last few years. Australia has a bad habit of glorifying the wrong parts of stories…

But before we dig into that let us start with the heroes we at least got right.

Veterans are, in my eyes, the true definition of heroes. Many of them gave up literally everything to defend something that was both intangible and yet so obviously real that it almost defies belief. Over the past 100 years, hundreds of thousands of Australian men and women have gone to war to defend this country that we are so lucky to now have. They recognized that what the Australian way of life represented was something more important than they themselves were as individuals. It is for these people that I attended the dawn service on that cold April morning this year. It is these people that I believe we as a nation have a responsibility to remember.

And yet even with this example I see Australia’s tendency to heap glory onto something which does not deserve any. Australian society looks upon the Gallipoli campaign as a magnificence piece of Australian military history. As if the entire Australian narrative could be coalesced and demonstrated in this short eight-month campaign. It was the place where the Australia we know was born and where this nation finally came into its own as a truly independent nation. The reality though is quite the opposite…

Gallipoli was a bloodbath. Australian soldiers fed into the meat-grinder of WW1 at the behest of British admirals who’s pride had been dented by the insignificance of His Majesty’s Navy during the course of the war. If there is anything Australia must learn from the campaign it is exactly what happens when a country does NOT act as a truly independent nation. The Gallipoli campaign was a demonstration of just how much Australia still saw itself as part of Britain in those early years of the 20th century. And yet the media creates this glorious image of ANZAC day… there was nothing glorious about it.

So then this leads perfectly to something else the media has decided to glorify… something I’m sure I’ll cop a grilling for.

The two men recently executed in Indonesia for drug smuggling are not heroes. They were not ‘brave young men’, risking their lives in an effort to save their compatriots from the clutches of evil and corrupt government agencies. They were drug smugglers who got busted attempting to import and make an enormous profit off one of the most destructive drugs in existence. Now anyone who knows me knows that I’m very flexible in my views on drugs… But there’s a big difference between someone who is caught selling non-addictive, non-harmful recreational drugs; and someone who imports commercial quantities of heroin. But even if you ignored what drug it was that they got busted with… they were still in it for pure self-profit.
Nothing these two men did was heroic; did they clean up their act and pull their shit together after years of imprisonment? Yes, they did. Did they deserve the death penalty? In my opinion, no they did not. Do I have enormous sympathy for their families and loved-ones? Yes, I do.

But please, these men are not heroes.

Do you want to know who are heroes? The thousands of police and intelligence officers who put their lives on the line to make our society a better place day after day. Do you want to know who among those are particular heroes? The hundreds of individuals who operate deep undercover in large scale organised crime organisations. The kind or organisations that import commercial quantities of heroin over national borders. These people… the police officers and investigators the media is so desperate to hang as monsters for their parts in the capture of the Bali 9, the people who seek no recognition for their actions. These are the people that keep us safe at night. These are the people who miss their children’s birthdays, who never get weekends, who work shifts that span all 24 hours of the day, who sometimes return home in a body bag… all so this society can be a better place for all of us.

These people, they are heroes.