Top 10 Quotes & Sayings by Tim Soutphommasane

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Australian writer Tim Soutphommasane.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
Tim Soutphommasane

Thinethavone "Tim" Soutphommasane is an Australian academic, social commentator and former public servant. He was Australia's Race Discrimination Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission from 2013 to 2018. He has previously been a political staffer for Bob Carr, a columnist with The Age and The Australian newspapers, a lecturer at Sydney and Monash Universities, and a research fellow with the Per Capita think tank. He is a member of the board of the National Australia Day Council, and an ex officio member of the Council for Multicultural Australia.

We know that a large majority of the Australian society is extremely comfortable with a multicultural society, that we accept that living in a democracy means having a freedom to practise your religion within the limits of the law.
No-one wants to see violence of any kind on our streets, certainly not any violence that's justified by extreme nationalist ideas or that targets people because of their religion.
We have a natural constant craving for leadership. Democracy is always a fragile and imperfect achievement. Yet a distinct feeling of malaise in our political culture lingers. There is something missing from our public debates.
There are many in public life who deserve only our praise and admiration. But there are too many who are products of a class that knows little other than spin and the machinations of politics. Little wonder that leadership of the transforming sort is so hard to come by. The danger is that this may be permanent. Where our best people shun politics because the profession isn't honoured as it once was, this only serves to make the profession even less honoured.
People should not be responding to bigoted ugliness with any ugliness of their own. — © Tim Soutphommasane
People should not be responding to bigoted ugliness with any ugliness of their own.
I'm not so sure liberal democracy as we know it has reached its terminus. It's clear though, that many have genuinely lost confidence in the Australian political class. One reason is that we like to place enormous burdens of expectations on modern political leaders. To be sure such expectations aren't always honest. Just as we want better public services but object to paying the higher taxes that would make them possible, we often want leadership but only if there aren't hard choices with real consequences.
People have a right to protest peacefully, but there's absolutely no excuse for anyone to be conducting a campaign of intimidation that may be directed at anyone because of their religion or because of their background.
If anyone has engaged unlawful activity, they should be held to account with the full force of the law.
Anti-Muslim protests represent a fringe of our society that's seeking to promote hatred and division.
You can protest, you can protest peacefully, but keep things civil.
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