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John Anderson continues to lift Australians with ears to hear.

Back in February, he encouraged an invite-only ASPIRE audience of 700 to put courage over complacency.

His opening address was characteristically clear, optimistic, and blunt.

Anderson warned, “The good ship Australia is taking on a lot of water. We are now listing badly in increasingly hostile international waters.”

He added that Australia’s greatest threat is found in some of its most cherished attributes.

The rejection of hierarchy, an easy-going irreverence, and the refusal to take ourselves too seriously, he said, “May have cast a long shadow, that of complacency, the ‘She’ll be right mate’ attitude.”

Complacency Versus Bondi Beach

He said that the Islamist massacre of Australian Jews on Bondi Beach was a shock.

“Truth is that we’ve now been jolted out of our complacency.”

“Bondi confronts us with much that is deeply revealing and concerning about us. Guns were not the primary problem at Bondi,” Anderson explained.

“And whilst we all acknowledge the horrific impact of the shooting on our Jewish neighbours and friends and families, the scourge of antisemitism, it must not be forgotten, is not new. It’s an ancient and pernicious evil.

“And even radical political Islam is hardly recent. It’s been around for 15 centuries or so.”

What changed, he said, is that:

“We’ve created an environment in which these threats and many others have arrived in all of their hideousness in our midst [and] on our watch.”

“Suddenly, we’ve been mugged by reality. We must ask ourselves the question: are we worthy heirs to those who struggled so long and so hard to give us a safe and harmonious and free and prosperous country in which we might live.”

This bleeds into the greater challenge: Finding our beliefs again and the confidence built upon them in the face of a determined enemy.

As Anderson argued:

“Surely the greatest challenge we must really tackle is that we’ve lost confidence in our own values and the beliefs that birthed them at the very time that we face great conviction and self-belief in those committed to tearing us down.

“And it is this lack of conviction that is creating a vacuum into which all sorts of civilisational dangers are taking hold.”

Quoting Thomas Sowell, Anderson added, “‘Civilisation doesn’t fall out of the sky. It doesn’t sustain itself either. It has to be built. It has to be maintained. It has to be defended.’ But then he says this, it’s so important. ‘Most importantly, it has to be understood. And when that understanding is lost, decline is not just likely; it becomes inevitable.’”

The once Deputy PM turned podcaster said that we’ve allowed ourselves to slip into the illusion of believing that civilisation is permanent. It’s not.

“It’s rented, and every generation must pay the rent. Right now, we’re skipping the payments and the landlord always shows up eventually.”

How to Rebuild Our Civilisation

Anderson then stated that history is shouting at us.

“No peoples,” he said, “have developed a finer set of institutions in a world that is often failing and broken and uneven as we know it for human flourishing of the sort that we have and we enjoy, and we’ve taken for granted.”

“Unfortunately, we’ve neglected, even abused, the institutions of freedom from the most basic societal unit, the family, right through to our parliamentary processes.”

The good news, Anderson said, is “those institutions are still with us. They still exist. And our task now is to rebuild them. It’s to renovate them. It’s to regenerate the institutions of freedom for ourselves but especially for our children and our grandchildren.”

His call for courage over complacency also featured in a 2022 piece for the Menzies Research Centre, where the farmer and former MP wrote,

“Have we been so intent upon questioning our own values, on convincing our young people that they are inheriting such an inherently bad culture that there is real ambivalence about defending it?

“Have we become so comfortable and insular that we have lost our capacity to understand the real nature of the world around us? Did we so buy into the myth of the ‘lucky country’ that we forgot how much work and sacrifice went into keeping us safe?

“The dangers inherent in our complacency are grave. We are not, as a country, being realistic about the urgency, as this election campaign so clearly demonstrates.”

In the piece, headlined Courage Over Complacency, Anderson recounts his father’s World War II service in North Africa. He then puts the clear-eyed courage of Federation next to today’s sleepy post-Berlin Wall complacency.

Put simply, we are a people that needs to reacquaint itself with readiness and the meaning of the adage: the cost of freedom is eternal vigilance.

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Images: Screenshot of YouTube and ASPIRE.