*Pic: Picture, the ABC says of dead man Abdul Numan Haider, taken from Facebook. ABC Story HERE
The latest incident associated with the heightened terrorism alert in Australia required a response from a person with accountable authority. That person has declared the critically important statement that is so implicit to garnering the trust and confidence of a community.
“Nature abhors a vacuum and it’s very much my judgement call and the judgement call of my colleagues that in these circumstances we should be fulsome in the information that we provide to you [the Public through the media] so that that absence of information isn’t filled by speculation and doesn’t lead to the sorts of concerns that might arise in a community where there’s an absence of information, timely information.
[Luke Cornelius, Assistant Commissioner Victoria Police – on the shooting dead of a young man in a Victorian Police Station]
Reference: Police shoot knife-wielding 18 year old dead in terrorism investigation ABC-rn AM 24 Sept 2014 http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2014/s4093484.htm ]
Reactive fear taps into a basic survival-mode brain function – namely our [i]fight-flight-freeze[/i] brain circuitry. Without integration and reflection from our higher cortical centres of the human brain we – as a society – can quickly cascade into primal modes of reactive response (at its most basic – kill or be killed).
Eleven and a half years after John Howard took Australia to war in Iraq, our former PM issued a mea culpa – of sorts. Mr Howard tell us he was convinced that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction by the ‘force of the language’ in the United States intelligence assessments.
Andrew Wilkie our MP for Denison and nationally famous whistleblower is not ready to accept his belated penitence.
Professionals like the former Office of National Assessment officer, Andrew Wilkie know the importance of authenticity and honesty in the gathering and analysing evidence. He knew in 2003 that decisions affecting the lives of potentially millions (not to mention major environmental destruction) could be determined by whether political decision-makers, like former Australian PM John Howard,
ensured that the advice they accept and act on is empirical data based on proven facts that had been corroborated by independent, ground-truthed confirmation.
And yes, context is everything. As above quote from senior Victorian police officer Mr Cornelius is reiterating, speculation and assumption cannot be allowed to fill ‘the void’ vacated because no one in authority was accountable for the information they acted on.
That was John Howard’s lingering embarrassment – like George W Bush and Tony Blair – to take responsibility, in Howard’s words yesterday, for ‘an erroneous conclusion based on the available information’. [Reference: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/iraq-wmds-and-counter-terrorism-andrew-wilkie/5759502 ]
Major decision-making based on rumour, anecdote, speculation and assumption are – in my opinion – acts of madness. Speculation is no basis for a war … on anything!
