If Islam is well structured then surely the extremists can't hide behind the dogma even without "an independent judiciary, backed up by a parliament and ultimately the defence forces, to handle the judgements"?
Well they can and they do because they break the laws.
I was reading the drivel that is the Courier Mail this morning and the editor (I think he was germinated and raised from a seed packet of Yates "Grand LNP" ) decided to wax lyrical about how we are tolerant society, predicated on a history of freedom, fair go, classlessness, mateship, work ethic and apparently we are an Anglo-Irish tradition at that.
I don't know what history books they taught at Christopher Dore's school, but I'm pretty sure Ray Martin's reinventions of the great Aussie bloke wasn't compulsory reading.
Australia as I was lessoned was at best struggle street for much of it's history, with landed gentrified squattocracies (the bedrock of the Libs) running workers ragged while they headed to the ocean for the summer breezes. The Irish were trouble makers at best and plagued the mining fields with their not so funny shenanigans. As late as the 20th century the Lawsons, Bango Patersons, CJ Dennis', etc were still at it with the bush versus city versus hand to mouth poverty.
The truth is that Australia has always had big government involvement because we had a big place with only a few people to develop it. The running gang battles, the ethnic tensions with and expulsion of Chinese, Kanakas, etc, the inequity of the genders, the aborigines, the blue collars, the living hell hostels for migrants etc seem to be conveniently ignored when it comes to fabricating a myth to engender some kind of fantastical society of "fair go".
It wasn't niceness that caused Governor Philip and the succeeding Govs to share equitably the food store with covs and cons alike, but survival of the colony; however he is the "fair go" origin bloke IMO that planted the seed in between flogging people for not behaving. Macquarie was another fella who seemed to have had his ruling class epaulettes tarnished in favour of nation building with his notion of best man for the job attitude.
It's the govt who decided to square things up for the working class after the capitalists had hijacked our birth rights for profits, by introducing world firsts like arbitration commissions, basic wages, fair days pay for a fair day's pay. etc.
All we ever asked for was that anyone who came here didn't scab on his work mates, learned English, absorbed the racial taunts without protest, assimilated into our part of the British Isles, had a healthy distrust of any politician who made the mistake of thinking he was one of us and you just didn't sh!+ the mob. Barracking for the right team also didn't hurt. If we were all going to be marooned on a desert island with aggressive neighbours to the north we had to get on and be seen to be fair while trying to shake down fools with money and means.
That's Tisme's eye of the past. Maybe things weren't so candy canes and fairy floss before Al Grassby, but no matter how we look at the past the all pervasive smell from Govt is all over our psyche and it's govt that needs to show mature leadership, not playing new jet setting kid on the UN block to whip up international ferment for war.
We don't need Chris Dore's romantic notions of a matey nation built on the sweat of blokes (sans women and natives) who did it for a fair go and obsequious devotion to LNP neo nationalism; the obvious paper thin corollary being that the narks on the outer promising to cause mayhem because their feelings have been hurt cum insulted, should understand we (Rupert Murdoch) are merely humouring them for now, but tread carefully.
That these new mice that now roar with swords, practice a ubiquitous slavishness to a book of words written by empire building bloodlusting blokes who hadn't conceived of human cultural evolution, industrial revolutions, knowledge flourishes and that smarts is not the preserve of those with rat cunning, speaks heaps about how people will opt for a lazy way out everytime their comfort zones are threatened...and as usual there's no better way of copping out than to blame others, look for a green light in a religious book of sky fairies and omnipotents written by millennia dead bludgers. It breaks the boredom of the same thing day in day out; putting on a uniform and going to war for some cause, whatever cause in the name of an invisible delinquent landlord who hasn't had the good sense to fence in his sheep from spoiling the crop ..... and that's just the Catholics !