The Fragrance of Hope, Draft 01. a speech anyone can use

Australia has plants that need something brutal to happen in order for them to germinate . . . Fire. Drive through a burnt forest a few months after the flames have passed and below the blackened trees that will be standing there as hopeless as gravestones, you will find around their base a new dawn of bright, green leaves.
Come back in a year and these shoots will have become the architects of their new forest.
Covid was our culture’s great fire, and you, the freedom movement, in all its forms, have been busily establishing yourselves, and thanks to your ever-growing ingenuity, resilience and determination, our future could be yours to create.
You, I believe are the architects of the new Australia.
I can see a country built upon the integrity of your souls.
And whilst this is an enormous challenge and a life changing blessing, that can offer you a deep purpose, it also comes with a great responsibility. A responsibility that you have already proven you are worthy of.
The Councils are already reacting to your growth and persistence. trying their best to lock out your voice. But it won’t work for long. Come the elections you will win seats; I know because this is already happening. I've seen it.
All over the country networks are being created, and as some fall over, for various reasons, stronger ones are being established on their collapse, as you learn from your mistakes, because you are all living proof that failure is the essential and inescapable path to success. When you are not frightened of failing, you are unstoppable.
Our ideas, our actions, will become the legends of our new country. Stand in the Park, live streaming reporting, The forest of the fallen, My Place and others and of course the birthplace of the Australian Freedom Movement, Camp Epic.
And new ideas, like 8:32, will keep coming, because we will harvest them from the forest where all our ideas are created, the Wild Forest of Free speech.
A freedom that, despite their censorship, we have stoically defended.
Always I hear you bouncing ideas off each other. Vigorous explorative conversations, where fresh ideas are inspected and challenged yet the owner of the idea isn’t judged.
This is because the owner is a free-thinking individual, and our tribe not only values free thinkers, but we can offer you another precious freedom, the ability for you to be yourself. To choose for yourself, to think for yourself, to speak for yourself, and those freedoms will be the engine of our victory.
I don’t know when, but we will win.
But, before we reach that victory there are some things we have to do.
First off, we must forgive the others. . . Not our leaders, but their followers, our brothers and sisters, and one of the reasons why we must do this, is Strategy.
We have significant challenges heading our way, and our best chance of overcoming them is with greater numbers. Their numbers.
So, how do we attract them back to freedom? What should our marketing campaign look like?
We don’t need to create a marketing campaign because we already have one, it’s you.
You continuing to be you.
Every time you are out there, being yourself, it is like you are taking a lap of victory.
Bit by bit, one by one, the rest will see it and not only get it but want it. Need it.
And if they don’t, well, forgiving helps too. Because we have a lot to do, important work, essential, and since we are proceeding, regardless, we need to journey forward with clean souls, as clean as the leaves of the fresh shoots growing after a bush fire.
We don’t have the time to waste on resentment and bitterness. That is a power they will hold over you. Free yourself from their judgement, which we know was flawed. I know it’s hard, but just let it go.
You don’t need their acknowledgement, and what they need is guidance, what they need is love, what they need is you.
One by one they will come to realise that.
The third thing we need is a destination. An idea of what our new Australia will look like.
Once we can see it, we can reach it, or build it . . . Or so I thought. But I was wrong.
We can already see it, not with our eyes, but with our need, with our actions.
The Covid fire might be passing, but what it has done has been good for us, for we have now reached a point where our dead wood and the weeds that have entangled us, from decades of easy living have been burned off by segregation, by how you bravely did what was right and not what was popular, by your willingness to accept and endure pain, even when the end to this pain wasn’t in sight. By the courage you had to defend your freedom.
You now are the foundation of the Australian Freedom Movement, a brand new tribe, who, for all of its persecution, loves to give and to help others.
We may not have articulated it, but together we have learned the profoundly deep power of empathy.
To a coward, empathy looks like a weakness, but to us, well we know that it is even stronger than fear.
For they can’t build a sustainable culture that anyone would want to live in, on fear, whereas we can build a warm country, a free country, a lucky country, upon empathy.
And that is our destination. That is where all our compasses are pointing. Can you see it?
I can, and I don’t even have to dream, but there it is, an Australia we are building upon the greatest foundation block in the universe, love.
When they cast you out, they expected you to fold, to come back begging on your knees, and if you refused, then you were expected to die out there, alone.
But you didn’t do any of those things. Instead, you have become our beautiful plumb line in the sand; the blueprint upon which we will build a better country for our Children and those children yet to be born.
And finally, there is one more discovery I have made.
Thanks to you, I have learned that the hope we’ve created and create emits a fragrance, a fragrance I first smelt in the Marches in Melbourne. A fragrance reaching out to us from the future that has imbued itself into my soul.
And so what does it smell like, this fragrant hope that you are all creating?
Well, at first, I thought it smelt like the promise of victory. But then I realised it was more than a promise, now I know that this fragrance of hope is the scent of our new Australia, reaching out to us like a beacon from the future.
A fragrance that smells to me, like home.

M