And so, finally, five years after his capture, the known terrorist comes home. Instead of the ogre – yet still chained and colourfully suited – he turns out to be an apologetic fool, hopeful his nation may one day be proud of him.

This is what our government has to show for its five-year war on terror. This is the one tangible proof of its success. No, he’s not Osama. He’s not some crazed ideologue, nor even, any longer, a terrorist. This “worst of the worst”, as the government once put it, is now just a “terrorist supporter”.

That was what he “copped” for and that was his ticket home. It will cost taxpayers $500,000 for his flight, an obscene amount given that he really doesn’t, nor ever did, pose any threat to anyone other than himself.

But the government needed to maintain that aura – private flight, red jumpsuit, chains – to somehow help justify why it left this pathetic extra languishing for so long.

He was a physical presence that could be used to help explain the need to bomb a country into ruins, to tear the limbs from old men and women, children and babies in quest of our “security”.

After all the lies about mushroom clouds and fingers on buttons, David Hicks remained as proof that IT could happen here.

He was the terror at our doorstop. Even now he serves his purpose. The focus remains on him and his misdeeds, on what he has cost us. For less than the price of a dining room renovation in the prime minister’s residence, attention remains on the most insignificant of players in an ill-conceived game that appears without end and whose purpose becomes more clouded by the day.

We know now that when he meets his father at South Australia’s Yatala prison on the weekend, contact will be separated by security glass. For part of the next nine months he will provide a diversion from reality, a lightning rod for public opinion, a debating point that will become more academic as the date of his release grows closer, one more negative neutralised as the federal election draws nigh.

Reality remains ethereal. Budget surpluses speak of economic responsibility, yet deny our underfunded schools where teachers struggle with large classes and mounting social problems.

We pay in advance through levies on our incomes but hospitals have waiting lists that stretch beyond the life expectancy of some who desperately require their services. We have “full employment” but that term has become meaningless through definition.

We have apparently become “richer”, yet our debts mount and for many their next pay day remains the touchstone that keeps all the balls airborne.

For others, home ownership stays out of reach, real jobs – ones that can be relied on to build futures – are the next town or state away and opportunity is something that may come one day.

David Hicks, meanwhile, will remain locked in his cell for 23 hours a day under full surveillance. He has a radio, but access to newspapers, television and videos is a privilege for which he must wait. Five years after he was traded for cash to the United States by the Northern Alliance, cameras monitor his every move.

In Afghanistan, where he was found, security deteriorates by the day, movement by reconstruction teams is restricted to absolutely essential travel and foreign troops appear to be being drawn into an increasingly bloody conflict.

Iraq is a basket case with no real solution in sight to the mess we helped create. Prime minister Howard remains recalcitrant. Accepting the Jerusalem Prize from the Jewish National Fund, Mr Howard told the audience that we would remain in both Iraq and Afghanistan, arguing that if Australia was to withdraw from the “front line of the war on terror” it would create instability in the Middle East and South-east Asia.

“The reality is that if terrorism is victorious in Iraq, the consequences for the Middle East will be far-reaching and quite horrendous,” he was quoted by news sources. “It would deliver a mammoth blow to the prestige of the United States in that part of the world, and it will also have repercussions for the stability of our own region because it will embolden the recruitment activities and aspirations of terrorist organisations through Asia and, most particularly, in Indonesia.”

What he mounted in defence of “staying the course” reads increasingly like a requiem, only it isn’t. It is a mantra of justification that could well prove more dangerous to our national interest than David Hicks ever was or could have been.