After this week’s sobering address by the nation’s top spy it’s time to accept reality: this country is engaged in a battle of ideas that has been thrust upon us by malign forces – foreign and domestic.

We need to act accordingly.
In order to prevail, this country needs to mobilise its most effective weapons – the ideas and principles that can defeat those who are tearing away at our social fabric.

Mike Burgess, the head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, recognised this week that this attack on social cohesion required a broader response.

“ASIO and law enforcement are part of the solution, but not the full solution,” said while delivering this year’s Lowy Lecture.

“You cannot spy your way to greater cohesion. It requires a whole of community, a whole of society response.”

Part of his proposed response – more civility in public discourse – is clearly necessary and needs to be taken to heart by those who have made parts of our cities unsafe for others.

But here’s a caveat: while civil discourse is desirable, it cannot be allowed to overwhelm the idea that there is right and wrong in this world, just as there is good and evil.

If we are to maintain this country’s social fabric, a more robust response is required.

There needs to be a renewed and uncompromising adherence to the doctrines that underpin Australian democracy – the principles that are known collectively as the rule of law.

That means incorporating these ideas far more rigorously in a new approach to law making as well as a more focused approach to civics education.

Some assume incorrectly that the rule of law is the chief tool of autocrats – a method by which rulers subdue the ruled by demanding blind obedience. It’s actually the reverse.

In free societies like ours the principles behind the rule of law act as a bulwark against arbitrary rule: a set of benchmarks for governance that gives effect to the idea of what Australia is all about: a fair go.

In 1951, one of this country’s greatest judges, Owen Dixon, went so far as to assert from the bench of the High Court that the Constitution itself rests on the assumption that the rule of law remains in place.

In order to prevail in the battle that is now under way, governments at all levels need to accept that the time for lip service about this doctrine is over.

Civics education about these ideas is clearly needed – particularly for the waves people who are arriving in this country with an inadequate understanding of the principles that underpin our democracy.

If we are serious about addressing the threat identified by Burgess, the first of those principles to be given new life should be the right of every Australian to equal protection of the law, regardless of race, religion or national origin.

That means taking serious steps to address not just Victoria’s crime problem, but the epidemic of religious intimidation and violence directed against Jews.

Equal protection along with the other aspects of the rule of law explain why this country has become a bastion of equality and fair dealing while others have not.

These ideas are all about protecting the rights of the individual against the arbitrary exercise of power. At its core is the presumption of innocence – an idea that requires the state to prove guilt.

This is bolstered by the associated rights to a fair trial, the right to equal treatment and the rule against retrospectively imposed penalties.

The strength of these principles is that they sit above partisan politics and enable politicians from all parties – and the broader community – to judge for themselves whether proposed changes to public policy are desirable.

Is it, for example, desirable to ease the burden on prosecutors by reversing the onus of proof in particular categories of legal matters so some people are assumed to be guilty and must prove their innocence?

History shows that these principles have informed past debates and provided reliable guidance when it comes to fair dealing.

We now know, for example, that we diminished ourselves by repugnant laws denying Aborigines equality of citizenship and equal protection under the same laws that apply to everyone else.

That was fixed. But the fight for equal treatment is not over. Race-based laws are back on the agenda – at least in Victoria.

That state plans to create a separate body of law that would be made exclusively by Aborigines and would apply exclusively to Aborigines.

Victoria’s move falls on the wrong side of the dividing line between societies governed by the rule of law and those in the grip of identity politics.

Because the rule of law principles are above politics they give ordinary people the tools they need to hold governments to account without resorting to partisan loyalty.

This is what civics education should be about – not merely the outer trappings of democracy such as the colour of the benches in the Senate and the different electoral cycles for federal and state parliaments.

The trappings are important but it’s the rule of law that sets this country apart by providing the basis for freedom, justice and equality.

We need to mobilise those ideas and send them in to battle.

One of the most perceptive aspects of Burgess’s address was his recognition that while Australia is an island, we are not isolated from those who would do us harm.

“The tyranny of distance does not make tyranny distant.”