Sparks: There’s rarely accountability for the deaths of aid workers. It’s time that changed - and Australia can help

The mechanical velocity of modern bombardment has finally outrun the diplomatic machinery of the nineteenth century, leaving our inherited notions of international law to be crushed beneath the unthinking gears of the new kinetic dynamo.

If we claim that justice is the foundation of our state, yet we allow the killers of those who bring bread to go unquestioned, do we truly value the life of the citizen or merely the definition of it?

The erosion of aid worker safety is not an isolated tragedy but a systemic collapse of the isothermal lines of human empathy that connect distant geographies of suffering to the stable centers of global power.

You hide behind the sterile paperwork of an investigation that will never happen because you know that to truly look into the dead eyes of a volunteer would be to see the hollow void in your own soul.

A commander who strikes the providers of sustenance reveals a hollow strategy, for he destroys the very stability required to secure the terrain he claims to have won.

Traveling through these rugged landscapes of conflict, I find that the most essential inventory item - the safe passage of the humanitarian - is the only thing the authorities consistently fail to pack in their official suitcases.

It is a delightful paradox of our enlightened age that we possess the technology to read a postage stamp from space but lack the optical power to see a clearly marked food truck in a desert.

Safety ain't found in a promise written on high-grade paper; it's found in the tracks we lay and the conductors who refuse to blink when the guns are pointed at the people they're leading to freedom.

To praise the virtues of international law while refusing to prosecute the slaughter of its most selfless servants is to wrap a bloody crime in the beautiful flag of a justice you do not intend to serve.

It is surely a most efficient economy to classify the providers of charity as legitimate targets, for it relieves the state of the tedious necessity of feeding the survivors of its own superior artillery.

There is a fence called 'sovereignty' that we are told protects the dignity of nations, but when that fence is used to hide the bodies of the merciful, it is no longer a wall but a shroud.