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[Intro Music]
[Applause]
I want you to question the comfort that you get from compromise.
When we're faced with diverging possibilities, we often seek the middle ground,
and this is a useful mental shortcut which often does good for us,
but it can go wrong, and sometimes we don't notice when it goes wrong.
I see this in my clinical work as a psychiatrist, ten-year-old Brandon's parents have divorced,
they can't decide with which parent he would be better off living,
and so he lives one week with his lonely father in Parramatta, the other week with his mother's
new family in Manly, he goes to school half-way in between, which means that he has no school
friends within twenty miles of where he lives, he is constantly tired from travel
and from the emotional demands of his divided loyalty towards his parents.
I think a good example of bad compromise on a more global stage is Israel-Palestine.
I think that a real possibility of Middle Eastern peace is contingent
on the establishment of a single,
democratic, secular state within the boundaries of Israel-Palestine;
the so called one state solution
that would restore human rights to Palestinians.
Now the divergent view to that is a different kind of one state solution, it's a radical
Zionist proposal that, based on ancient religious precedent
that the state, uh, should be freed of any non-Jewish residents,
or at least their human rights should be further eroded.
Now many of you will be passionate in opposing both of those positions,
you will say that both of them represent a failure to compromise.
Well I visited the result of decades of compromise last year, and what I saw was settlements,
checkpoints, security wall, reducing indigenous Palestinians to various levels of sub-citizenship.
One of the radical unifying approaches needs to be adopted.
We can't compromise our way to the right number of settlements,
or the right course for the security wall.
Once you go looking for bad compromises they are pretty easy to find.
We laugh at, um committees and how they tend to gravitate towards the least confronting
and often ridiculous lowest common denominator compromise.
Who needs committees?
A recent example of a toxic situation, where the choice
was neither one thing nor the other was a decision to suspend the processing
of asylum seekers who have arrived by boat, most of them for a six month period.
Now compromise is usually presented to us as a generous act,
as a form of political maturity, I want to argue that
compromise is in fact, more often about political expediency,
and is often an intellectually and morally lazy stance for people to take.
Compromise is more often about pleasing people than it is about grappling with really difficult decisions.
I know sometimes that need not necessarily be a bad thing,
there are times in which people's happiness is more important than the truth.
But I want you to think about a time in the last week when you've compromised,
either at work or at home
with your children perhaps, and I want you to examine
whether that compromise was in the best interest or whether, in fact, it was something
that you knew you should have taken a stand on but elected not to.
I think we need to find a space for hard edge negotiation, where we
faced with two difficult options, we decide that we are going to choose one of those two options,
and we live with the consequences.
Now that is not the same thing as being pig-headed. If new evidence emerges we should change our mind.
That's not compromising, that's reacting to evidence.
We don't, we should also be careful about accepting established wisdom, things that already seem to be decided.
If it looks like the middle ground is a strong consensus,
think, in fact, that this might be a black and white issue,
it might be a right or wrong answer. And of course vice versa.
But uncertainty isn't necessarily, that doesn't necessarily signal that there are shades of grey.
If you um, toss a coin, uh, you don't know whether it will
come down heads or tails, but it will be one or the other.
A close cousin to compromise is risk avoiding decision making.
This is where faced with a difficult choice, we take the option which makes us least
uncomfortable in the short term.
Angry awkward Grace who was 15, took an overdose, a serious overdose, and finished up in hospital,
and she was still suicidal. Now the safest immediate
thing for us to have done would been to keep her in hospital.
But it seemed that the biggest issue for Grace was that she could no longer bear her parents fighting.
And if we would have put her in hospital we would have been,
or kept her in hospital, we would have been identifying her as the sick one,
we would also have been saying that the family couldn't really manage the problem.
that was facing them. So we elected to take what was in the short
term the riskier option which was to discharge her,
in the expectation that we might be able to help the family
to exploit the crisis in order to make changes in the marriage.
The big area where you and I have to make a decision
about whether there is a right or wrong answer
is in relation to whether climate change is something
that needs our urgent attention, or whether we can wait and see.
Now here's an area where we might be inclined to hedge our bet.
How many of us are paying money towards tree planting to offset carbon use, but at the
same time turning a blind eye to the high polluting profile of our superannuation portfolio?
Hedging our bets is really the same as not betting at all.
So how should we make a decision in this area?
The ideal would be if we could each, for ourselves, take the evidence apart
and arrive at our own conclusion.
Most of us don't have the resources to be able to do that,
and so it comes down, to a certain extent, to deciding
which expert we are going to trust.
And here are some shortcuts which might help you to make that decision.
Sadly, we are all self-seeking and biased.
I, for example, as a doctor am very scared about the health impact of climate change.
I need to declare that interest.
We also need to look at interests that extend beyond the individual.
We need to look at an expert's affiliation with industry,
and probably, if an experts career stands to be enhanced,
say by the petrochemical industry, or their point of view
is amplified directly, or indirectly by the petrochemical industry,
then we should discount their opinion accordingly.
Whether or not they are wittingly biased, we know from a raft of research that people's opinions
will be influenced by those kinds of obligations.
You can't find the truth by checking what most people think,
although our politicians seem to think you can.
Nor is the truth a blend of available opinion.
And truth isn't necessarily what matches your own ideology,
and haggling might be a good way of deciding what
the right price is of something you want to buy,
but you can't haggle your way to the truth.
It's intolerance of doubt which drives us towards the middle ground.
I'd urge you to resist the numbing, the pleasant numbing that comes from compromise
and to take the chance of being wrong, and to make decisions out of not knowing,
rather than some false sense of certainty.
If you toss a coin and you bet on it coming up heads
you'd be right only half the time.
If you bet that it's going to land on it's edge you'll be wrong always.
Thank-you.
[Applause]
Captioning services provided by Michael Lockrey.