Harnessing the beautiful diversity of Western Sydney

A short tale of a Citizens' Assembly

I chickened out. Sitting in my hotel room a few hours before the event, I reread the talk I was to give at the launch of the permanent Citizens’ Assembly being established in Western Sydney and I realised it was too long, that I would go over time.

I ummed and arred about which sections to hack out, and one of those I ended up scribbling all over with a biro I found in the desk drawer in my room was the paragraph that talked about love and kindness and how important those things are to the community engagement we were there to talk about. I convinced myself that it made me sound too wishy-washy, that maybe the audience wouldn’t respond to what I was trying to get at.

Boy, was I wrong.

The entire evening was a testament to exactly that, to the fact that a community brought together under the right circumstances and with a shared commitment to making that community better is, almost by definition, steeped in love and kindness.

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