If you ever find yourself facing a capital charge the first thing to do is not find a good lawyer or tell your mum. You should pray that Tony Abbott keeps his mouth shut. The moment he opens it you might as well say your last goodbyes.
Abbott's linking of Australia’s billion dollar aid package to Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami – which killed around 200,000 Indonesians – with the fate of two convicted drug smugglers is absurd. His declaration that if Indonesia refused to ‘reciprocate’ for Australia’s tsunami assistance ‘we [would] feel grievously let down’ takes the idea of humanitarian aid to a new low.
John Howard, it seems, was a political naif after all. When he announced the assistance in early 2005 it was about helping Indonesians rather than Australians. He described the tsunami as ‘a human tragedy on a scale that none of us in our lifetime have seen and it does require a response above the ordinary’. No mention of reciprocity of any sort at any later date. When he was asked if the $500 million earmarked for concessional loans would be tied to Australian companies Howard replied, ‘No, no … that’s not the purpose of the aid’.
Tony knows better. While a good deal of the package was probably never actually spent he’s calculated that Australians are worth around half a billion dollars each. He also knows that executing Australians who have broken Indonesia’s drug laws is not in that country’s ‘best interest’.
The Indonesians might well have a different view.
21 February 2015
