A TOUCH of cynicism – with a dash of hypocrisy – coloured our week. Indonesian President Jokowi led the charge by executing Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran while pleading for mercy for his own countrymen on death row in similarly barbaric justice systems abroad.
Robert Macklin.
The AFP, which should have hung their heads in shame for dobbing the drug runners into the Indonesian authorities instead of picking them up in Australia, persisted with their holier-than-thou stance. But Opposition Leader Bill Shorten’s claim that the Government was at fault for watering down the AFP guidelines really took the cake.
Surely the time has come for the ALP to admit it picked a dud and to give Anthony Albanese a go. At least he’s an authentic Labor man who cares more about the cause than his own ambition.
AND where, one wonders, were all those free-speech “Je suis Charlie” enthusiasts when an obscure soccer reporter on SBS made his extravagant (but not wholly unjustified) comments about the Anzacs that got him sacked. And for Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson to deny that Scott McIntyre had been “censored” was sophistry at its most flagrant.
The Anzacs were not angels, however much the mythmakers try to convince us otherwise. And while there was no suggestion that Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull had a hand in the sacking, one might have hoped that he’d ask the sackers to take a cold shower before they acted.
SO, too, the Director of the National Portrait Gallery, Angus Trumble, who removed President Jokowi’s portrait from the gallery’s walls in the wake of public reaction to the executions. The photographer Adam Ferguson was on the money when he said the decision had been “misguided”. He didn’t think Australians would be “silly enough” to deface it. Quite so.
AND when will we stop using the awful euphemism “culling” of the native animal that adorns our coat of arms and say we’re actually “killing” them. Not just a few dozen, you understand, but 5000 over the next two years! The “kill” order was issued on April 14, in unhappy irony by the conservator of our local fauna. He reckons the ‘roos were threatening “four woodland bird species, the grassland earless dragon, the striped legless lizard and the Perunga grasshopper”.
Honestly, I’m not making this up.
I WONDER what the conservator has to say about Senator Zed Seselja’s suggestion that Canberra should expand way beyond Tuggeranong into settled kangaroo habitat. No doubt he’ll demand special attention to the earless dragon and the Perunga grasshopper… the ‘roos can make their own arrangements.
FINALLY, we cannot let the occasion pass without tipping our lid to a grand example of local fauna: Jack Waterford, the last departing survivor of the golden age of “The Canberra Times”’. Many former colleagues, your columnist included, owe him a debt of gratitude, in our case for a job offer when outrageous fortune had brought us low. Jack was an institution. His only fault as a commentator was that he’d never write a sentence when a paragraph would do! He will be much missed.
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