There is something increasingly sad about watching the police in Britain and Australia become involved in stuff that once would not have been considered police business.

People being arrested, investigated or otherwise subjected to police attention for words such as “muppet” may sound almost comic. It isn't.

It matters because policing depends upon something more important than the power to arrest. It depends upon public confidence that the person wearing the uniform understands the difference between crime and annoyance, danger and offence, disorder and mere disagreement.

I was a cop for over 30 years. I ended up resigning because I couldn't cope with the way things were going.

Most of my time was served in the Aussie Outback. I loved it. I lived in places many only dream about and I met people who made me proud to be part of their lives. And I like to think that they felt the same about me. We were on the same side. If some old bugger got drunk, we locked him up for the night to sober up and my missus cooked him brekkie the next morning and we sent him off with his tail between his legs and a hangover. But with a full belly.

He had been a nuisance. He had not been an enemy of the state. We all knew the difference.

I want to talk to you about something rather more important than a four-letter word.

On the face of it, this is a story about a woman who felt insulted and discriminated against in the country she had adopted as her own.

But I think there is something much deeper going on here.

It concerns an Australian telling another Australian to “piss off” ... and a court deciding that, in the circumstances in which it was said, those words amounted to racial discrimination.

That raises a rather awkward question.

What happens when an expression that is ordinary, familiar and deeply embedded in Australian vernacular is taken out of the culture in which it is used and examined through an entirely different lens?

Because piss off is not, to most Australians, a racial expression.

When I was a small girl I read a book about a mountain nurse in Tibet. The place seemed impossibly far away: high trails, hard journeys, people who needed someone brave enough to go and help.

Years later I learned what had been done to Tibet, and the wish turned into a question I still cannot answer. I am seventy-one. I still do not understand why the world treated it as settled.

That is why 1 October 1949 matters to me.

On that day Mao Zedong stood on a balcony overlooking Tiananmen Square and proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China. The civil war was not quite finished, but the Nationalist government had withdrawn to Taiwan and the Communists controlled most of mainland China.

And Tibet was on borrowed time. Only they did not it yet. 

I spent most of my working life in the Aussie bush. It is a way of life most Australians would struggle to understand.

Picture this. You’re on a cattle station the size of a small European country. The nearest hospital is many hundreds of kilometres away, the roads are red dust tracks, and someone in the family has taken a bad turn. No phone, no ambulance, no chance of a doctor riding up on horseback.

Then -  a sound overhead. A single-engine plane rattles in from the horizon, wheels kicking up dust as it lands in a paddock. Out climbs a doctor, medical bag in hand. For us blokes out bush, that wasn’t just a plane. That was hope.

That’s the story of the early Royal Flying Doctor Service -  or as most people know it, simply “the Flying Doctor.”

This is not my story.