Me? On balance, I think I'd still rather live in Australia. It's possible, I suppose, that we'd all be marginally more secure living in a land where our own forces would be free to 'work the dark side of the street' to use the the words of the US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, but would that kind of 'security' be worth it?
At the very least, at the bare, hungry sniffin' minimum, can we acknowledge that there really is some defence in decency?
I refer to a story written by Herald journalist Tom Allard this month, where he quoted a leading South-East Asian terrorism academic, Dr Rohan Gunaratna, speaking at the National Press Club, saying that though there had been sleeper cells of Jemaah Islamiah in Australia in the late 1990s - including around Dee Why - the problem is they had essentially gone troppo and enjoyed their time here too much to go ahead with the dastardly terrorist plans they were meant to execute.
'Australian ethos had dulled their ideological convictions,' Gunaratna said. 'They were sympathetic to the cause but didn't want to die for it.'
Maybe life is a comedy and mercy beats at the heart of the universe.
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