Rob J Hyndman

• Fac­ulty news
• Mon­ash memo
• My thoughts on win­ning the award

OK, I con­fess. I reck­lessly loaned my phone to someone I didn’t know well. I also reck­lessly stopped to help a woman whose car had broken down. Then I reck­lessly paid for a man’s lunch when he couldn’t do so him­self. Any one of them could have been a ter­ror­ist. I plead guilty. Please lock me up. I’m a danger to soci­ety. I’d rather die in prison for reck­less acts of kind­ness than live a free man in a coun­try where love, mercy and com­pas­sion are outlawed.

The Aus­tralia Insti­tute homo­sexu­al­ity sur­vey con­fuses homo­pho­bia with opin­ions about mor­al­ity, “Homo­phobic? Us?” (The Age, ³⁰⁄₇). The ques­tion that has attrac­ted the most atten­tion was whether people thought homo­sexu­al­ity was immoral​.It did not con­cern hate, fear or tol­er­ance. It is pos­sible to believe homo­sexu­al­ity is immoral without hat­ing those who prac­tise it, or fear­ing them. After all, most of us think steal­ing is immoral, but that doesn’t make us all thief-​​a-​​phobic, or fill us with hatred of shoplift­ers. The Aus­tralia Insti­tute report seems to assume that any­one who con­siders homo­sexu­al­ity to be immoral is also homo­phobic.The Age art­icle encour­aged this assump­tion with head­lines such as “Homo­phobic? Us?”. This incor­rect assump­tion cre­ates an envir­on­ment which makes sens­ible debate almost impossible.