“My name is Scott Anthony Rush and since August 2005 I have been a resident at the Kerobokan prison in Bali. My experience here has been a unique one to say the least.”
That’s the way Scott Rush, one of the Bali nine who had his sentenced increased to death last week, welcomes you to his website. On the site, where you can read about his life and leave messages of support, he also appeals for financial aid through a trust fund. He needs the money, he says, to help pay for “rent, electricity, food, water, clothing and laundry, medical and dental services” as well as prison programs such as painting, sport and craft. Any funds raised supplement the $125 a month the Australian Government already provides for prisoners in Bali. So if Australian prisoners abroad are reduced to having to beg to survive, are we doing enough to financially support?
http://blogs.news.com.au/news/crime/index.php/news/comments/bali_prison_aid/
9 comments:
Scott Rush’s website is hosted by a group called The Foreign Prisoner Support Service, which also encourages people to send aid packages to Australians in foreign jails. It provides a list of suggested goods to send, both “primary essential items” (toiletries, laundry powder, Savlon etc) and “secondary essential items” (clothes pegs, cigarettes, rubber thongs, packet noodles etc).
On his website you can email Scott Rush, sign his guest book, read letters of support, look at silver bracelets he’s made in prison as well as find bank account details of where to send donations.
The $125 a month of financial support provided by the Australian Government is a “loan” that is repayable after a prisoner’s release.
According to the Foreign Prisoner Support Service it represents about 875,000 Indonesian rupiah. The cost of an average meal of rice, chicken and vegetables costs 5000 rupiah. A small bottle of drinking water costs 2000 rupiah, a 5kg bag of rice costs 20,000 rupiah and 1kg of chicken costs 15,000 rupiah.
Scott Rush’s family says it is also paying $340 a month to support him in prison.
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I understand why a person would want to live. I understand why a person would want a shorter prison sentence. I understand why a person would want easy money. I have made mistakes in the past. Yet I don't understand why someone would courier drugs.
Even as a child, I'd seen sufficient pop references to know that drugs harm people. Every smacked out piece of trash one stumbles over on their journey through life is a moral lesson.
I'm glad Scot was caught. I hope he continues to make himself useful, as silverwork is. I hope that those who are touched by his story support him.
The wheels of justice turned slowly for the 22-year-old South Australian woman who cannot be named because she was the victim of alleged child sexual assault. She first made a statement to police about being sexually molested by her stepfather in 1993 at the age of nine, when she was a “a scared little girl”. Charges weren’t laid for almost a decade because the man was interstate. She made a further statement to police in 2002 and the case finally went to trial in the Adelaide District Court in recent weeks. The outcome last week was that the man, facing charges of four counts of unlawful sexual intercourse with a person under 12 and two counts of indecent assault, was found not guilty and walked free. The reason? The judge decided that the details of the attacks the girl gave to police in 1993 were not the same as the evidence she gave in court 13 years later. The case yet again highlights to problems facing child sexual abuse victims seeking justice through the legal system.
Asked to explain the inconsistencies in her evidence, the woman told the trial that in 1993 she was frightened and didn’t understand what was happening when interviewed by the police Sexual Assault Unit.
“I was just shoved in a room with this lady and she was asking me all these questions. I hadn’t been told I was going there. I didn’t know that my parents knew. I didn’t know anything. I was a scared little girl thrown in a room with a police officer asking me all these questions.”
In the 1993 police interview, which was video-taped, the then nine-year-old talked about only one alleged attack by her step father and didn’t provide the graphic details of alleged sexual acts she later supplied in the trial. Asked why she didn’t tell police of the other attacks at the time, she replied: “I don’t know why I didn’t tell the lady.”
Quizzed about whether her memory had faded over time, the woman replied: “No, not really, because there are some things that will never leave me, that I will just remember like it happened yesterday.”
The prosecution argued that it was understandable that the woman did not tell police of all the sexual assaults in 1993 because of her fear. It was also argued that as an adult she also now had an “obvious improved ability as an adult to describe what had gone on when she was a child”.
But the judge didn’t agree.
“I am troubled by the differences between what the complainant said in her evidence and what she told the police officers in 1993. I do not accept her explanation as to why she did not in 1993 accurately describe to the police officers what had happened,” he said delivering his verdict.
“There are so many differences between what was said in 1993 and what was said in evidence that I am unable to rely upon the evidence of the complainant. The allegations made in 1993 are quite different from the complainant’s evidence to the court. The allegations have become more extensive and more serious over the years.”
Because the prosecution case depended almost entirely on the woman’s evidence, the judge found the man not guilty
http://blogs.news.com.au/news/crime/index.php/news/comments/justice_just_a_memory/
This story illustrates my fear in reporting my rape by a family friend when I was about twelve. My mother leveraged the incident to attack my father and discredit me. She recently posted a justification without apology, accepting no liability.
Children have no defence against family. My brother, when I began to assert myself at age 20, cast doubt on my recollection, suggesting I'd had a recovered memory. My older sister thought I should just move on with my life .. and reunite with my mother.
At university, I moved from home and supported myself. I was advised I could access welfare support, but that I couldn't access it through fingering my rapist, but by accusing my parents. I never got welfare.
I'm almost 40. I've never dated. I'm a recluse. I'm proud of my life's achievements, but I'm not allowed to publish that as my public service employer is threatening my employment if I do.
My heart goes out to this woman. I hope she can move forward. It doesn't surprise me that there is no apparent, legal, justice for her.
The face of our new racism, more deadly than the old:
AN Aboriginal baby was removed from the home of her foster parents because they had “too high” expectations for the child.
The couple, who own the successful Gavala Aboriginal Art Gallery in Sydney’s Darling Harbour, told the NSW Department of Community Services that they would be happy if the little girl grew up and went to university, or even worked in their gallery.
But Gavan and Alanna Rose* were told these expectations were unrealistic and that they might be too judgmental if the baby grew up to became a drug addict.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/stealing_their_future/
That judgement is serious. Consider, if that child becomes a drug addict they'll probably have low self esteem to begin with. Add to that poverty and promiscuity as they need some way to pay for their drugs .. Maybe the state government should anticipate the coming disaster, and place an injecting room nearby ..
Labor’s environment spokesman demonstrates the hazards of taking your grasp of climate change science from a movie. The Government’s resources minister luckily isn’t so stupid:
ANTHONY Albanese:
Does the minister recall dismissing Al Gore’s climate change documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, as “just entertainment”? Is the minister aware that the film documents the scientific consensus that global warming has led to a significant increase in both the duration and intensity of hurricanes and cyclones, and that this is consistent with the Howard Government’s own Climate Change: Risk and Vulnerability report, which it received in July last year? Minister, what was entertaining about Hurricane Katrina?
Ian Macfarlane:
There are three places I do not go for advice on climate change. One of them is to unsuccessful candidates for the US presidency who cannot even convince their own people that they are right. The second place is the movie ... The third place is the Labor Party, who promote a policy that will cost jobs in Australia ... The Labor Party is asking us to ratify Kyoto and cost Australian jobs, particularly jobs in the coal industry.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/gores_movie_cons_labor_on_katrina/
I think Queensland illustrates that there doesn't need to be substance to an ALP policy for it to get elected. Mr Albanese is a bad man, who is stealing my childhood.
When these are the kind projects that the arts bureaucrats of Mebourne City Council again fund with other people’s money drastic action must be taken. I suggest these bureaucrats be made to watch every single one of these projects - twice:
$6000 of ratepayers’ money will be spent on an exhibition of street art, expected to include films showing graffiti vandalism on city streets…
It comes on top of a $10,000 grant for an art exhibition on Camp Sovereignty, the Aboriginal protest camp in Kings Domain, revealed last week…
Other winners include:
A $6000 multimedia exhibition about the occult.
A $6000 exhibition about the “humour and humanity of travelling the Hume Highway”.
A $6000 sculptural and knitted presentation drawing on the use of “the female form and its capacity to incite followers to particular causes”.
A $10,000 production using animation, puppetry and physical performance to explore ethical dilemmas of biotechnology and genetics.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/arts_my_arts/
I recently completed a major work in my home locale. I wrote a contemporary short story. Narrated it. Placed music and effects. Took pictures of the locale. Got a person to play an observer.
The local museum paid an o/s based producer to make a similar project. They have no interest in me or my work. which, by the bye is located in reduced form at
http://www.icompositions.com/music/song.php?sid=43940
It has two 'sequels' on site
True, Kim Beazley’s notion of informing visitors on their visa forms of our values is pretty lame. But this response is a bigger worry:
The chair of the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia, Voula Messimemi, said Mr Beazley seemed to be trying to go one better than the Government’s floating of a citizenship test. “If you’re trying to reduce or eliminate terrorism, to put a list of values on a visa is a fairly ineffective tool.” Anyway, she said, “apart from the rule of law and democracy, the jury’s still out on what are Australian values”.
It is? And which jury would that be?
And why do multicultural “representatives” so often sound like they represent people who aren’t Australians themselves?
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/every_culture_but_our_own/
I think those traditional ALP values don't yet match Australian values, so they keep saying that Australia has not yet discovered it's identity.
I think core Australian values currently include mateship, fairness, perseverance and a quiet resolve. Whereas ALP values seem to include bullying, name calling, lieing and unmitigated ambition linked to fear of death.
Not all Australians match Auistralian values.
I thank the editor of The Age for agreeing to run my letter of reply to Robert Manne’s deceptive and abusive article.
For a fuller response to Manne’s smears, distortions and inventions click here.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/manneing_up/
I'm waiting for Manne to say sorry. I wonder if he has Chinese ancestry like I do.
AS THE world paused to remember 9/11 yesterday, Greens leader Bob Brown and Federal Labor MP Kelvin Thomson reminded us there are idiots out there who have learnt nothing over the past five years.
"We’re in a less safe world and Australia has been made less safe because the Howard Government has been involved in the Bush administration’s war in Iraq,” Brown said.
Thomson, once a member of the failed former Victorian premier Joan Kirner’s blighted inner circle, opined that “the war on terror has been led badly over the past five years”.
That al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden listed Australia as a terrorist target well before 9/11 because of the support it offered the East Timorese, seems to have escaped Brown.
Or is it that he chooses to wilfully ignore that inconvenient fact so he can side with the fanatical Islamist terrorists in their war against the West.
Thomson appears to be as woefully ignorant, as it would seem he is unaware al-Qaeda first tried to blow up the World Trade Centre towers in 1993, and that it seems highly probably that the supine inactivity of the Clinton administration did much to encourage the terrorists to proceed with their second attack eight years later.
By any measure, the war on terror over the past five years has been a success.
Ill-considered remarks by dopes like Brown and Thomson get coverage in the media because they fit the conventional view held by the Left and many leftist sympathisers in the media that the war on terror is a huge mistake – but that’s not supported by the facts.
Last week, President George W. Bush gave a fairly detailed account of the interrogation of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM).
The Greens and some members of the ALP bray about the tactics of the CIA in the war on terror, and have aligned themselves with the propaganda campaigns being mounted to paint home-grown jihadists like David “Daoud” Hicks and “Jihad” Jack Thomas as misguided fools who fell in with a bad crowd, but it is now clear that the grilling given KSM yielded a great deal of extremely valuable information.
The deluded civil liberties lobby might blanch at the methods used by the CIA (even Mr Bush conceded they were “tough") but they bore fruit.
In the five years that both Brown and Thomson view as wasted, the CIA has rounded up a number of senior al-Qaeda operatives involved in the 9/11 attacks, the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole and interrogated them at secret locations.
One of the first to be picked up was Abu Zubaydah, captured after he was wounded in a firefight in Pakistan. He revealed KSM’s alias, leading to his arrest, and also named another accomplice, Ramzi bin al Shibh, who was also picked up.
Brown and Thomson may not know it but KSM’s interrogation also led to the capture of Hambali, the Jemaah Islamiyah leader responsible for the 2002 Bali bombing.
After Hambali’s brother was also arrested, along with a cell of 17 other operatives, Hambali gave the details of plans for another attack on the US.
KSM also provided information on al-Qaeda’s biological weapons program and the interrogation of other captives thwarted attacks on Western diplomats across the Middle East and Asia.
The shrill critics of the Bush administration and its principal allies, Australia and the UK, like to proclaim their moral superiority and the abhorrence of secret prisons, tough interrogation techniques and, of course, the imprisonment of captives at Guantanomo Bay – yet they offer no solutions beyond appeasement.
Brown and Thomson and their fellow travellers would do well to visit Manhattan’s Ground Zero, the empty site where the World Trade Centre twin towers once stood, and consider the monsters responsible for the murders of more than 3000 people five years ago.
They might inform themselves of the true nature of bin Laden’s crazed ideology, his desire to destroy our culture and our civilisation and replace it with a bizarre mediaeval theocracy that would split the world into masters and slaves.
Brown and Thomson and others who style themselves as progressives might like to explain how they can reconcile their view that the world’s is worse off now than it was when Saddam Hussein, his gang of sycophants and his psychotic sons were running Iraq.
Had the critics of the war on terror had their way, al-Qaeda and JI might still be calling the shots, training homicidal pilots and suicide bombers, brewing up more batches of anthrax.
Contrary to the views of Brown and Thomson, Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty believes Australia is safer from terrorism today than it was five years ago because the level of consciousness and cooperation has improved.
Still, he admits, as the British used to say about the IRA, terrorists only have to get lucky once and the authorities must be lucky every day. We owe it to the victims of 9/11 to ensure that luck doesn’t run out
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/piersakerman/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/foolish_fanatical_fellow_travellers/
For the last year I’ve been posting regular updates of Iraq’s progress from the viewpoint of US Central Command.
My public service employer made me delete my earlier work, but I’ve still made regular postings at http://conservativeweasel.blogspot.com/ since June.
There is a clear disconnect between the wishes of the liberal left in Australia and the realities of achievements overseas. The foundations laid by the coalition of the willing in Iraq are firming. It is possible that insane policy (like that posited by Brown or Beasley) can hurt the Iraqi peoples, but they are way better off than they were under Hussein, or even a few months ago.
I understand that the current death toll centers around an action of confrontation with terrorists that is proving effective. The result is a far cry from when Saddam’s regime was a threat to any pretty girl or thinking man. The North and South no longer need fear purges. The population is growing. Under Hussein, Iraq was the largest nation to experience a population fall between ‘80 and 2000. Factor in expected growth and an estimated 6 million people have disappeared during Hussein’s time .. not accounted for by refugees.
Terrorists are not the only ones who lie to portray a false face. The australian liberal left have to portray an image that they were right in their initial assessment. They weren’t. There are two ways the left can deal with this disconnect. They can walk the road to Damascus, embrace policy that works and claim they thought it first. Or, they can doggedly hold to lies they made out of political opposition. Brown and Beasley are overcommitted to their lies.
However, lies, like those surrounding the war on terror, may easily get ALP office, just like the lies regarding IR laws allowed ALP to claim economic responsibility as benefit while opposing them in Queensland.
From a parish newsletter in a suburb in Melbourne’s east:
On October 19, three hundred and fifty people, mostly women and children desperately seeking a new and a better life, were killed when their overloaded fishing boat was “organized to sink” and they were allowed to drown to deter asylum seekers, possibly with the complicity of the Australian Government and Navy.
Where in the Bible does it instruct priests: Thou must believe in crazy conspiracy theories.
UPDATE: And other conspiracists do the scheduling for Channel 10, running the wildest hoax claims about September 11 in a disgusting documentary last Saturday. Have these people no sense of responsibility or of shame?
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/father_moonbat/
In my late teens I became a church going christian. Over twenty years later I've stopped. I haven't stopped for community reasons or religious reasons. I've become a recluse.
With a clear exception of some individuals like Cardinal Pell, Australia's religious leaders are captive to leftwing ideology in ways which supercede faith. It is very difficult to endure a sermon critical of conservatives with no religious point being made, or with faux thought experiments where conservatives are cold, unfeeling bad guys. Or where reason is diminished and falsehoods promoted.
I stopped giveing to Amnesty International Australia when they started supporting Hicks and his bretheren. I won't support other charities for similar reasons, except Medicine San Frontieres .. how could someone mess up giveing medical care?
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