While certain his recent comments about the Lindt siege may have incensed some folk, Fred Nile has raised an interesting philosophical question; did the actions of those unwittingly caught up in the siege amount to “bravery” of the kind sufficient to warrant formal recognition by the state?

First let me say that I don’t always agree with Fred's staunchly conservative view of the world, though I do agree a surprising amount of the time, as I suspect does an equally surprising percentage of the Australian community.

I was shocked by reports of some of the things Fred is quoted as saying with regard to the actions, or more precisely the apparent inactions of some of the Lindt siege victims.

However, I have some small experience of dealing with a media that’s looking for a head to pike and I know from personal experience just how easy it is to walk headlong and hapless into the “are you still beating your wife” style of interrogation Fred has recently found himself facing from journalists in search of that Holy Grail of journalism, the self-perpetuating headline.

For these reasons I am not as cynical as some when it comes to Fred’s claim that it was nothing more than a linguistic slip of the tongue that caused him to suggest the only man in the Lindt cafe that demonstrated any bravery on that fateful day was the man with the gun.

I can accept that it was nothing more than a clumsy faux pas; that what he'd meant to say was “the only man in the Lindt cafe that demonstrated any bravery that day was the man who wrestled with the gun”, meaning cafe manager Tori Johnson.

In my opinion this is a very minor and entirely reasonable concession to offer Fred, under the circumstances.

All that aside, we are still left with the question of whether the victims of the siege qualify for bravery awards and in fact whether it is legitimate to associate victim-hood and mere survival with bravery at all?

Surely there is no bravery intrinsic to falling victim to some violent act or tragic circumstance?

Under certain conditions it is possible to demonstrate bravery in one's actions as a result of, or even after such an event, but is there anything genuinely brave involved in being at the wrong place at the wrong time and passively awaiting rescue?

Is it brave, for instance, to be knocked down by a hit and run driver and being left to lay on the road?

Should the victims and survivors of the Port Arthur massacre be nominated for bravery awards?

Is it an act of bravery to jump up and down on a beach calling for help while someone drowns in the surf?

For that matter, is it a genuine act of bravery for a child to call an ambulance to his home where his mother lays dying on the floor after a stroke?

It is often hailed as bravery by the media, but is doing what one is taught to do in an emergency an act of bravery?

To me at least, bravery and heroism tend to go hand in hand and both generally involve some element of self-sacrifice.

I think what Fred was trying to say, was, that which the media now insists we recognise as “bravery” the Australian people once considered to be nothing more than their “duty”.

And in an era when it seems all sense of duty is being stripped from the Aussie ethos, an era where no-one does anything unless there’s something clear and immediate in it for them, it is hardly surprising we might now consider our basic human duties to be noteworthy.

In a recent media release, NSW Greens MLC Dr John Kaye said Fred's failure to recognise the bravery of the Lindt siege victims amounted to a failure to recognise their suffering and the suffering of their families for years to come.

But surely the victims of the siege had a duty to survive in order to spare their families the years of anguish Dr Kaye speaks of and it was this sense of duty, along with the innate human instinct for self-preservation that likely sustained them and perhaps even motivated them to flee the scene at their earliest opportunity.

Duty is something sadly missing in today's society and rebranding it “bravery” in an attempt to manufacture inspiration-porn to nourish a society increasingly driven by a “it’s not my problem” approach to crises seems a strikingly shallow motivational stratagem.

If the powers that be do decide to bestow bravery awards on the survivors of the Lindt siege, where will it all end and what of the equity issues?

For instance, what of the bravery shown by the many children who “survived” various abuses at the hands of the Christian Brothers over the years, or the thousands of Aboriginal children who “survived” Australia’s assimilation policies, just to name a few we might want to consider while minting all those shiny medals?

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