As our allies drop bombs over the Middle East, Australia has lost the choice of isolationism
By Hayley Cull
In the past week, Australia has committed millions to send missiles, aircraft and military personnel to the Middle East in recent days. Our willingness to deploy weapons must be out-matched by a willingness to deploy humanitarian support, writes Plan International Australia’s Hayley Cull.
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A missile kills girls in their school, and suddenly, children everywhere are a little less safe.
Oil facilities burn, toxic rain falls on playgrounds in Tehran, and fuel becomes a global crisis.
Hundreds of thousands of people are forced from their homes in Lebanon, and families worldwide wait anxiously for messages from loved ones.
Bombs rain on Iran and Lebanon, vital aid corridors into Gaza are cut off, and the cycle of trauma continues to spin.
Farmers struggle to access fertiliser, food prices rise, and children from Sydney to Sudan go hungry.
A butterfly flaps its wings, and maybe we remember that the storm never stays where it begins.
We live in a world that loves to pretend distance is a shield. That oceans and borders and time zones somehow insulate us from the suffering of strangers. We scroll past headlines that feel too confronting, and tell ourselves it’s sad, but it’s not our problem. We tell ourselves it’s not our fight. But it is. It always has been.
We are one world. One humanity. We are all connected. The past week must be a wake-up call that our prosperity, our safety, our peace is tied to that of people we may never meet. We don’t get to choose isolationism.
When conflict destabilises a region, the shockwaves don’t politely stop at national borders. They ripple outward, through energy markets, food supply chains, migration corridors, family texts, and the collective psyche of a generation watching it unfold in real time on their phones. The price you pay at the petrol pump, the cost of your weekly grocery shop, the anxiety you absorb from a world that feels increasingly volatile – it connects us all.
Australia has committed millions to send missiles, aircraft and military personnel to the Middle East in recent days. Our willingness to deploy weapons must be outmatched by a willingness to deploy humanitarian support. The kind of aid that saves lives rather than ends them. The kind that recognises our connection to this war as being fundamentally, inextricably human.
And more than that, this moment demands the dawning of a politics that sees we are nothing without global solidarity. It demands the complete rejection of isolationism. There is no room for nationalism in a world that doesn’t end at our borders. Pulling up the drawbridge has never made us safer, nor more human. It never will.
This week, Australians are coming together to support the Emergency Action Alliance, a major appeal bringing together 15 of Australia’s leading aid agencies to raise millions in humanitarian support for people in the Middle East. It’s the very best of our values: step up and help others when it matters.
And just as the Australian people are stepping up, so too must our politicians, and our media. We need to see as much attention on the humanitarian situation as we are seeing on military escalation and oil prices. It’s not enough to talk about war; our own humanity depends on our ability to talk about the people caught inside it, too.
If the force of violence can travel across borders, so too can the force of our humanity.
You can donate to the Emergency Action Alliance here.
About the author
Hayley Cull
Hayley is Deputy CEO at Plan International Australia, a leading international organisation dedicated to children, with a particular focus on girls. Over the past two decades, she has worked closely with governments, philanthropists, advocates and young people to drive systemic change, primarily on issues related to gender equality, child rights and humanitarian crisis. Hayley has a background in journalism, and has held leadership roles with Plan, UNICEF and various sector coalitions in Australia and internationally.
And fingers crossed Hayley, humanity must win in the end, otherwise what else is there?