Schapelle Corby.... Bogan criminals are not heroes

Bogan criminals are not heroes

Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
February 10,2014

HEAR that cheering — that soundtrack of our shame — as Schapelle Corby is released from a Bali jail? See media outlets wave as much as $3 million at the convicted drug smuggler for her story, to add to the $270,000 her family earned from her autobiography?

See Corby, the heroine of last night’s Channel 9 biopic, whose writer sighs she feels “very much for Schapelle” and “I carry that compassion before being worried about legal things”.

See Labor’s leader, Bill Shorten, shamelessly tell the mob “I don’t know all the ins and outs of what she has done” but he, too, wants “that woman back in Australia as soon as possible” because “that’s what matters to me”?

So I don’t blame Indonesia’s Justice Minister, Amir Syamsuddin, for that curl to his lip when he announced on Friday that he’d granted Corby early parole, not through “generosity” but “the laws of the land”.

You see, he said, “we are a dignified nation”. Unlike ... Australia?

I love this country, but then a Corby opens a jail cell and lets out a fetid blast of our convict culture — that deep, feral resentment of the mob of any check to its licence.

How that mob has trashed our reputation in the name of “our” Schapelle, the big-eyed formerbar hostess at the mercy of those brown foreigners.

Yet the case against Corby was damning from the moment 10 years ago that customs officials in Bali opened the bag carrying her boogie board and found 4.1kg of high-quality marijuana. (“No!” she’d gasped, reaching out to stop them.)

Already one of Corby’s half-brothers — among her mother’s six children by three men — had been convicted of drug possession and jailed for other crimes.

Later the half-brother travelling with her was also jailed over a drug-related home invasion, and last year fined for possessing cocaine. Even her father had a minor conviction for possessing marijuana.

No, a woman isn’t guilty just because her brothers are rotten. But Indonesia had arrested a representative of Australia’s bogan culture, and her tribe reacted in fury at their impertinence.

Newspapers attacked Indonesia’s courts as corrupt and their jails as temples of “gloating sadism” where there was “little sympathy for foreigners, for which you may perhaps read Christians”.

Radio hosts insisted then prime minister John Howard make Indonesia’s president fix the court decision, and one even raged the judges were “straight out of the trees”.

Indonesian diplomats here were sent death threats, white powder in the mail and two bullets with a warning: “Go home you animals”.

The Salvation Army, out collecting for its Red Shield Appeal, even had to promise not to send Indonesia any of the donations, while actor Russell Crowe warned Indonesia to remember we gave money for its tsunami victims, as if we’d only given so our drug smugglers could walk free.

Crowe also demanded Howard “deal with it”, asking: “What if it was your daughter?”

Speak for your own family, Russell. Howard’s, like mine, would never dream of smuggling a sack of weed. This isn’t “our” Schapelle.

If only this sanctification of the bogan criminal stopped with Corby. But we made a national hero of a thieving murderer called Kelly, and we’ve only got worse.

Killer Mark “Chopper” Read had leading journalists make him so famous with books of his alleged exploits that a movie was made of his life.

The natural moral order was inverted so completely that Read, a killer of four men, was used as a spokesman in TV commercials against domestic violence.

Then came the Underbelly books and television series that made cheap crooks and their molls household names, dusting even the dead ones with the bright dust of fast money and faster women that so impresses losers and fools.

The notoriety proved useful for underworld figure Mick Gatto, whose work includes persuading people in the construction industry to do what they’d much rather not, or else ... seen Underbelly?

And how often was this convicted criminal presented as a role model? A giver of charity?

Even the state-funded Melbourne University Press pitched in, idiotically commissioning Gatto to write his autobiography, and telling a restaurant full of men with black shirts and gold teeth how “proud and delighted” it was to launch these whitewashing memoirs.

How much has all this corrupted us? Is this why bikie gangs burst with recruits? Why police report a lack of respect for their authority?

And now Corby is coming out of her cell. What feral spirit is freed with her?

Idiot aka. arse hole,Australians,Grow up and take responsibility

Idiot Aussies: Grow up and take responsibility

By ALEXANDER DOWNER
The Advertiser
May 24, 2009 11:30pm

I DON'T know about you, but it's always nice to get emails. Once upon a time you'd look with pleasure at a handful of letters which dropped through the letter box. Now all you get are those threatening looking envelopes with windows. Or if you're Tom Koutsantonis, those nasty missives which tell you about passing unknowingly through a speed camera.

But this is a generalisation. At the height of the Schapelle Corby affair I received 5000 emails in one day from fellow Australians pleading with me to save "our Schapelle" from the horrors of the Indonesian legal system. Or, to be a bit more honest, the few I looked at said that.

I'm sure my successor as foreign minister, Stephen Smith, had his in box bursting last week as people demanded he save the beer mat mum, Annice Smoel, from the ravages of the Thai police.

I felt for him especially when the media started demanding he "do something" to save her.

After about 10 minutes as foreign minister I was a little surprised to learn I was "responsible" for miscreant Australians who got into trouble in foreign countries.

No, no, no, don't get it wrong - drug traffickers, drunks, kleptomaniacs and fraudsters weren't responsible for their own stupidity - I was.

It's about time that great nanny in Canberra, the Federal Government, turned around and told people they are responsible for their own decisions.

I was in Lebanon the other day and went down to the southern cities of Sidon and Tyre. They're fascinating places - old Crusader castles, bustling souks, colourful little food stalls with generous owners offering you a taste of their wares.

But I couldn't help remembering the awful events in those same places three years ago when Israel went to war with Hezbollah.

There were said to be 20,000 Australians in Lebanon at that time and a hefty percentage of them were demanding the Australian Government save them and fast.

Lebanese support groups hit the airwaves screaming that the Government was too slow getting those Australians who wanted to be evacuated to safety. But hang on, Australia's about 15,000km from Lebanon and we don't dock ships in the eastern Mediterranean ready to ferry Australians to safety.

And there was something else. We'd issued a travel advisory months earlier warning Australians of the dangers of southern Lebanon and the risks of going there.

It didn't matter - apparently we had to get them out.

We were lucky. The Australian ambassador, a petite, charming professional called Lyndall Sachs, worked day and night chartering ferries and providing comfort to the evacuees, who hadn't cared about the travel advisories, and whisked them to safety.

It was one of the great achievements of an Australian diplomat. Almost single handedly, she managed to get around 5000 Australians to Cyprus and Turkey.

We then chartered planes to take them back to Australia. I hope they built shrines to her. Some did, at least metaphorically.

But some just whinged. They felt seasick on the ferry and that was our fault. Could they get frequent flyer points for the free flight back to Australia? And all this cost around $30 million dollars - your dollars.

I'll tell you this - I didn't get 5000 emails of thanks but I got plenty of abuse because we weren't fast enough, the ferries didn't go from their port of choice and we were slow because we were racist, and so on. I mean, we'd warned them and told them not to go to the south of Lebanon. They went all the same. And when the proverbial hit the fan it was, you guessed it, "our fault".

Then there was Hurricane Katrina, which flooded much of New Orleans. A mother of an Australian who arrived in New Orleans the day the hurricane hit came to see me in Stirling and demanded I get her son out. Americans couldn't get out but I had to get her son out. I asked if he'd heard the warnings from the U.S. Government that week to avoid New Orleans.

She started shouting. He doesn't follow the news, he doesn't watch TV or read the newspapers. I see, I said. It was my fault he was in New Orleans, was it? What were we to do? Fly helicopters from Australia to America and pick up Australians and leave the Americans behind?

I didn't have the guts to say this as foreign minister but don't you think you should take responsibility for yourself when you go overseas?

If you're too dumb or idle to read the travel advisories and too mean to take out travel insurance when you go overseas then you ought to take responsibility for your own behaviour.

Sure, if there's a catastrophe like the Bali bombings or you're trapped in a corruption scam the government should try to help. But not if you're too lazy and silly to help yourself.

Remember two things when you travel. First, there are no special laws for Australians overseas. Foreigners make the laws over there, not us. And secondly, foreigners do things differently and they're entitled to.

If you go to a Muslim country and get wildly drunk and women start dressing down (if you know what I mean) it can be bloody offensive to the locals. You'll soon be in trouble.

And learn to take responsibility for your own behaviour. Stealing is wrong, even stealing beer mats. I know, I know, the beer mat mum had a few drinks but, no, she wasn't drunk and she was charmingly polite to the local police.

But she was in a foreign country with a different culture and all of us ought to respect that.

Alexander Downer was Australia's Foreign Affairs Minister from 1996 to 2007

I well remember these Lebanese "flag of convenience" Australians demanding that the country they so despise and abuse,Australia,extract them from the country they call HOME once the shit hit the fan in their home.

Suddenly the Australian "life support system" and Judeo Christian legal system that they had disconnected themselves from to return HOME, was not so bad after all, and they immediately started enunciating, in the best Australian accent and terminology they could muster before the worlds TV camera's, their right, as Australian's to be repatriated to, (what they had decided, since the the Israeli's started kicking their preferred "home's" arsehole from sunrise to sunset),Australia, and whats more,those racist, bigoted, infidel, Judeo Christian, Skips,Aussie Pigs and Sluts should pay for their demands as well.
So far a fraction of the $30 plus million that it cost the Australian taxpayers to bring these gutless sniveling cowards back to Australia from the place they call HOME has been repayed by these Lebanese "flag of convenience" Australians.
The obscene debilitating costs of the hoax of Multiculturalism go on and on, this is but one example of how the western host country is cannibalised by the imposition of middle eastern colonialist's by left and Multicultural friendly governments.