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Despite (or maybe thanks to) a privileged upbringing in Canberra, I was largely ignorant of politics until my 40’s. Certainly I went along with trends, such as sporting a “Shame, Fraser” badge in November ’75, strictly banned by my private school under pain of not being admitted to the matric exams. I removed the badge and topped the HSC in NSW, but salvaged honour the following year by dropping out of first-year science at ANU and studying piano at the less prestigious Canberra School of Music. In hindsight, I’m grateful that politics wasn’t a dinner-table topic (though certainly a pervasive, if to me opaque, theme at school). I was “deprived” of both TV and politics. My parents preferred books and music.

Life and music took me to Europe, and Zürich became home for most of the ’80s. Further political activities included: collecting Swiss signatures against the Franklin Dam; taking my wife and daughter to an anti-nuclear demo and getting tear-gassed; admin volunteering for medical aid for Nicaragua; joining anti-bank demos in Zürich; donating to WWF and Greenpeace; and wearing a bright green jumper at street celebrations for the election of… the Greens! All completely clueless. As the saying goes, “if you’re not a socialist by 20, you have no heart …”

I’d meanwhile read my way out of atheism, through Judaism (Buber) to Christianity (Guardini), and it was also time for our young family to move back to Australia, with the promise of sunshine, a real house and garden, and no acid rain. I swapped knee-jerk socialism for knee-jerk conservatism, and got to know Christopher Pearson and his circle. We all need a tribe. It was the Howard heyday, and I listened to Parliament for hours on News Radio. Our family grew and thrived; the children were largely home schooled, and three of them later attended a Great Books college in California, whilst the younger two stayed in Adelaide and became professional musicians. I contested a SA seat for the DLP in 2010 and got 1 per cent of the vote.

This long preamble is meant to frame a final, relatively recent political re-think. The Murdoch press was extolling the US anti-Russian “Magnitsky Act”, emulated by many countries including ourselves. The whole Magnitsky story had been concocted by hedge-fund manager Bill Browder (see his book “Red Notice”) and further searching took me to Robbie Barwick’s Citizens Party interview with Lucy Komisar, and the mind-blowing discovery that the entire Western political establishment had believed a stupendous financial scam ($US500M in today’s money). If deception on this scale is possible, then what else? I devoured Robbie’s interviews with retired diplomat John Lander, and then the world looked different. Existing power structures suddenly had feet of clay. And whilst it’s good to see evil exposed, the only response can be—let’s fix it!

All of us at the Australian Citizens Party stand for uncompromising honesty in politics: it’s far better not to be elected than to lie or dissemble when in power. The sovereignty of our country and the dignity of each citizen are central, and every political act needs to hit that sweet spot where both sing harmoniously. We need to be humble and learn from successes elsewhere (say, education in Finland, resource ownership in Norway, democratic subsidiarity in Switzerland…). But let’s also be big enough to acknowledge other traditions. China, Russia and Iran, for instance, are ancient cultures that we might not only befriend but—dare we say—even learn from. Peace among nations, peace at home, and peace in each human heart: these things are intimately connected and depend on one other. It’s called “The Common Good”.