Speech given at the closing plenary session of the Now We The People conference, 24.8.03 University of Technology, Sydney

Rev Dr Ann Wansbrough

If you are like me then over the last year or two you've probably become increasingly angry and frustrated, and so when you come to workshops and conferences and meetings of various alliances what you want is to get on with the job and to see things happen and it's really very hard, sometimes, to do the things that our last two speakers have said - to actually work with people that we don't naturally feel comfortable with, to extend our horizons, and to actually trust people who come from a different viewpoint than us, and who really don't just see things the way we do.

On Monday night I had a very interesting experience which I guess has helped shape what I'm going to say this afternoon. I was in a meeting of a coalition which the debate was whether that coalition should come to an end…and I was speaking and someone got up and interrupted me. I had three minutes to make my speech, this guy had made his speech already, and he got up, and started to talk. Again! He'd already wasted the time pf the meeting, fooling around about who should be chairperson at the meeting, so this was not a good experience - not only for me but for a number of other people in the meeting. And it got me thinking: well what was wrong with this? What was wrong with that particular organisation? And what are some of the values and the concept that enable us in meetings and coalitions to do the sorts of things that have just been outlined for us? How do we get beyond having different approaches to things?

I'll start with an article this week by Sojourners, an American organisation, a Christian group, which has been very active in peace and justice over at least the last twenty years. The leader of that group, Tim Wallace, has just written an article in which he's said the problem with George Bush is that he keeps using Christian language and he's totally opposed in fact to what Christianity's really about. Because George Bush thinks you can define where goo and evil are in terms of things like national boundaries, so he has lines about where good and evil are that run between nations, maybe within nations between groups. And the point Jim Wallace made, and he was spot on in terms of Christian theology, is that what he doesn't understand about what his own church believes is that the line of good and evil runs within every person.

And if we are to work effectively as alliances, we need to remember that, that there is no person we can completely write off as evil, and there is no time when we can assume that we as an individual or our particular organisation has got it entirely right and is entirely on the side of the good.

In churches we talk about confession, in politics sometimes they've talked about things like self-criticism. It's about recognising that we can't divide the world into good and evil, we just need to reflect together on what is happening, and what can we learn from one another. We need to be open to keeping one another honest. We need to develop a sense of respect for one another that says 'yes, I will respect myself, I will respect the organisation I represent if that is the case in an alliance, but I will also respect people who are different, and I will also respect their organizations. And let's get together as equals. Let's stop having Messianic complexes that say "If people just do it my way everything will be fine", and start saying "let's learn from each other" That is the value of an alliance. We all bring some strengths with us. We all bring some weaknesses that we can ameliorate if we learn from other people's strengths and build from other people's strengths as well as our own.

One of the most crucial things that we determined a few weeks ago, the organizations that have started the Sydney Peace and Justice Coalition, is that duty of care matters. If we are going to organise events for young people and old people, and families with children and people with disabilities, we can't design them as if only healthy young men were going to participate, or active young women. We need to have a duty of care. We need to think about what will work for everyone. That is part of respect.
But there are a couple of other things that are perhaps worth mentioning. One is a term that is not often heard these days - humility. Now we all know example sof people who like it, and I'll avoid going into those, because I think the examples are pretty obvious. But it's easy when you see those people to actually get so caught up into being an alternative that we can fall into the same trap ourselves.

The other thing is wisdom. There are myths around, that people go off and try and find the wise person who is on some lonely mountain somewhere and having reflected on life, all on their own apparently, they are the person you can turn to for profound help in human life, and it's totally wrong. And the reason we need alliances is that they are the only way that we find true wisdom, and the true future of peace and justice. But we actually need the wisdom of one another, and we build wisdom together.

Finally, I want to say that we need to find ways of refreshing ourselves. There is no point in burnout, and it is very easy in this day to burn out. And so some of us believe in God, and seek to refresh ourselves through prayer and worship and getting in touch with the goodness of human life. Some of us don't want to believe in God but we need to find other ways of meditating in or refreshing ourselves and getting in touch with the goodness of humanity, with the goodness of the created world, because only as we build up that side of our life will we be able to sustain ourselves in what is actually a very hard struggle for peace and justice.

Rev Dr Ann Wansbrough is a Policy Analyst with Uniting Care

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