There is hope that some form of justice will be delivered to the Afghan victims of Australian war crimes. But to ensure that such deadly crimes are never committed in our name again, we must examine the role that creeping militarism plays in our society and give priority to civil institutions that strengthen our resilience against the profiteers and architects of war.

The Australian colony was established on the dispossession of its Indigenous inhabitants. The sole moral principle applied was that the strong shall do as they will and the weak suffer as they must. Failing to replace this founding principle with any sturdier narrative of national legitimacy, Australia has since lived in a perpetual state of fear that the dispossessors would inevitably become the dispossessed – and a pathological obsession with controlling our borders has flourished ever since.