I looked out my office window this morning and tried to imagine my neighbourhood bombed.
Not metaphorically. I mean I actually tried—the jarrah tree, the pub next door with cars left from the night before, the sound of a bin being wheeled out somewhere—and overlaid onto it the footage I’ve been watching. Buildings flattened. Dust where streets used to be. A man carrying something I couldn’t look at directly.
The pub. Flattened. The place where people gather precisely to feel normal—to correct back to normal—reduced to rubble that someone walks over searching… for something, anything that once was.
I couldn’t hold the image. My mind kept correcting it back to normal.
Maybe that’s the distance.
I’ve been writing a novel for a couple of years—set after a Collapse, ecological, political, moral—that arrives not as a single catastrophe but as a long accumulation of ignored warnings, concentrated power, and systems that rewarded cruelty over care. I thought I was writing speculative fiction. I’m increasingly less sure.
Last week, the US bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities. Australia backed the strikes—carefully, diplomatically, with calls for de-escalation in the same breath as expressions of support. Our Prime Minister said Iran had failed to come to the table. Our Foreign Minister said the world had long agreed Iran couldn’t be allowed a nuclear weapon.
And both of those things may even be true. That’s what makes it hard.
Because somewhere in the gap between the statement and the bomb, between the policy and the body on the ground, something human gets lost. It gets processed into justification. Forwarded to the relevant ministers for their information and awareness.
I’ve been watching footage that Iran is putting out. A father with his daughter. Ordinary streets. People who look—who are—exactly like people I’d want at my dinner table. Is it propaganda? Probably partly. Does that make the people in it less real? No. It just means I have to hold two things at once: a government I am not supposed to trust, and a people I recognise.
I keep thinking about something the political theorist, Hannah Arendt, once observed—that great harm rarely requires monsters. It requires ordinary people making decisions at sufficient distance from consequences. The further you are from the body on the ground, the easier the decision becomes.
Trump has grandchildren. Netanyahu has grandchildren. Putin reportedly adores his daughters.
Kim Jong Un appears with his young daughter.
The Ayatollah was killed alongside members of his family. Close. Together.
Make of that what you will.
I look out at the pub, the cars, the jarrah tree—and try to hold this: that decisions made by men who love their own children could flatten this street and take mine with it.
I don’t say this to excuse them. I say it because if we make them monsters, we let ourselves off a hook we need to stay on. The capacity for this is in us. That’s the point.
Australia’s position is tangled in architecture built over decades—AUKUS, the American alliance, Pine Gap humming quietly in the desert providing intelligence we don’t ask too many questions about. We are not simply complicit. We are structurally enmeshed. There’s a difference. It doesn’t make me feel better, but it’s true.
Paul Keating has long argued that our security lies in Asian engagement rather than reflexive alignment with an increasingly erratic American foreign policy. Many serious analysts agree with him. I find myself—like many Australians—suspended between an alliance I inherited and a values framework I chose.
But the clearest test of Australian values isn’t Iran. It’s Gaza.
The images came for eighteen months. At some point I stopped flinching. That might be the most honest and uncomfortable thing I can write today.
Buildings flattened—the same image, a different place, a longer accumulation. Australia sanctioned Russia for invading Ukraine without much internal debate. We struggled to use the same language about Gaza. That inconsistency is not invisible to ordinary Australians. It has cracked something in our social fabric that our political leadership has managed rather than addressed.
The protests. The arrests. The cancelled speakers. The lobby behaviour that shapes which candidates survive and which don’t. The accusation of antisemitism levelled at anyone who applies to Israel the same standard we apply to everyone else. These are not fringe events. They are the sound of a society trying to reconcile stated values with observable behaviour—and finding the gap too wide to ignore quietly.
October 7 was real. The fear that Israeli people carry is historically grounded and not invented. I hold that. And I hold this: that a response measured in obliterated hospitals, induced famine, and a killed civilian count that has long exceeded any proportionate definition of self-defence cannot be squared with the values we say we hold. Not if those values mean anything beyond a phrase on a government website.
Australian values. The phrase gets tossed around like a settled thing. It isn’t. Values are not what we say in the good moments. They’re what we do when it’s complicated and costly and our allies are watching.
Kindness. Humanity. These are not soft words to me. They are not naïve. In the world I’ve been building in my novel, kindness became the organising principle of survival—not because it was easy, but because everything else had already been tried..
I’m not asking Australia to be defenceless. I’m asking what it costs us to keep choosing the side of the bomb over the side of the person—and whether we even notice anymore when we make that choice.
A car pulls into the pub. Last night’s car drives off. The jarrah tree is doing what it always does. I can’t hold the other image in my mind for more than a few seconds before normal reasserts itself.
I think that’s the thing politics being removed from humanity had in common with me, on an ordinary Wednesday morning in Western Australia.
We kept correcting back to normal.
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