Leadership Quote by John Hewson

“To make us a terrorist target in a region that is full of terrorism is dumb and unforgiveable” lands like a clenched fist on the lectern: blunt, moralizing, and engineered for maximum political friction. As a politician, John Hewson isn’t trying to sound nuanced; he’s trying to sound decisive. The line’s power comes from its refusal to launder policy through euphemism. “Dumb” is deliberately un-Canberra in its plainness, a word chosen to puncture technocratic justifications and recast them as reckless incompetence. “Unforgiveable” escalates it from a bad call to a breach of duty - not merely mistaken, but morally indictable.

The phrasing also smuggles in a theory of causality: that “we” (read: government) can “make” ourselves a target through choices - alliances, deployments, rhetoric - and that this risk is not abstract but predictable. By repeating “terrorist/terrorism,” Hewson leverages the ambient fear already present in public life, but redirects it away from a distant enemy and toward domestic decision-makers. That pivot is the subtext: the threat isn’t only “over there”; it’s the strategic vanity or ideological zeal that invites blowback.

“Region” does heavy lifting. It paints a map where danger is endemic, implying that inserting oneself into such a landscape is less solidarity than self-sabotage. The sentence is built to shame: it frames interventionist or high-profile alignment as not courageous but irresponsible, and it dares opponents to defend why Australians should bear a heightened risk for someone else’s war.