Press Clippings 19

After dinner address, National Value Education Forum,
Matthew Albert
(Ottoman restaurant, Canberra, 2 May 2005)

When I speak at primary schools, I make a point of explaining how it is that most refugees are forced to seek refuge. I tell the children of refugee friends of mine when I was living in Nairobi.

“Refugees can become refugees for doing simple little things, like drawing a picture” I tell them. “Have any of you drawn a picture?” Of course, the hands of the whole class fly up. “Some of them become refugees for writing stories, and some of them for doing exactly what I am doing now, speaking to groups of people”.

The students are inevitably dumbstruck. They are right to be. With age, we seem to lose sight of these simple facts; people have to leave all they have for talking to others with a message, writing a story or drawing a picture. If only we could all be as befuddled by this as the children in the primary schools.

What refugees teach me is what it is that they value and prioritise. To me, they have their priorities right. Valuing beliefs, opportunities, each other and life itself are most important. Any of these are so easily taken away.

In Australia, we sometimes seem to lose sight of these bare necessities. We focus too much on the icing and not on the cake. If we are to introduce values education is must focus attention on sweetening that cake rather than adding icing.

I went for a walk in Kampala, Uganda and came across a school sign. The motto for the school grabbed me. “Strive for joy”, it said. Cliched? Maybe, but simple and true too.

So how to get this message out there? Again, to me it is simple. We have to make these issues; human rights, the refugee experience and substantive justice more immediate. I take instruction from the aphorism of Dag Hammerskjold, the first Secretary General of the United Nations. He poses three questions;

If not here, where?
If not now, when?
If not you, who?

The ball is in our court. We can play hard or we can play with compassion.

Or, we can play hard for compassion.

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