AT A public meeting recently, an orator, promoting the implementation of a particular policy, was encouraged from the floor:  “Don’t let the do-gooders get in your way”.

I imagined that the guest speaker, who probably thought herself to be doing some good, was bemused by this curious cocktail of encouragement and insult.

How is it that we’ve let ‘do-gooder’ become a pejorative?  What is it about doing good that we discourage?  And why, when it comes to taking sides in ‘do-gooders’ versus the rest, do we want to be with the rest?

I imagine that the origins of this are quite simple and understandable.
 
The Macquarie says that the term means, “a well-intentioned, but often clumsy social reformer” and it almost certainly emerges from temperance movements of the past.  Wowsers were attempting to do good, and in so doing were widely perceived as being out to spoil everybody’s fun.

But, is that thinking still relevant?  Look at today’s ‘do-gooders’: refugee advocates and opponents of mandatory detention; anti-war activists; lobbyists for truth in government; opponents of commercial developments.
Ask yourself whose fun they are trying to spoil.  These are people who, rather than blindly accepting ends, question means.  They insist upon due process, fair representation, ethical decision making and observation of the inherent wrong in deliberately ending human life.

Correctly, we label these efforts as an attempts to ‘do good’. 
Inexplicably, many deride those making them.

‘Do-gooders’ have an antithesis.  Amongst the sickening platitudes offered to the recently deceased Joh Bjelke-Petersen (the absence of the title is
deliberate) was this gem from his widow.  “Joh was somebody who got things done.”

Similarly, George W Bush, in telling us about his appointment of a renowned bully as ambassador to the United Nations, said “John Bolton gets things dern.”

‘Getting things done’ is code for achieving an end, regardless of the means.  In Graham Richardson’s terms:  whatever it takes.

Pol Pot got things done.  Hitler almost did.  Until very recently in this country the Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs was well on its way to ‘getting things done’.

Questioning the means is honourable and ethical.  It is to be encouraged.
 
If to do so is to be considered to be a ‘do-gooder’, then count me in.