He doesn't deserve a minute of your time

He doesn't deserve a minute of your time By Piers Akerman November 29, 2005

THE nation pauses for a minute on Remembrance Day to remember the Armistice called at 11am, on November 11, 1918, bringing an end to World War I.

On Anzac Day people stand at ceremonies, in schools, in offices and in their own homes, as the Ode, the fourth stanza of British poet Laurence Binyon poem To the Fallen is recited, refreshing the memories of the great sacrifices that have been made to keep this country free.

Now, in a fit of collective madness, advocates of lunar politics such as the Democrats' perennial undergraduate Natasha Stott Despoja, the Greens' inner-urban conspiracist Senator Kerry Nettles, and the wetter-than-water Liberal Bruce Baird, are demanding a national minute of silence to mark the expected end of the convicted drug smuggler Nguyen Tuong Van in Singapore this Friday.

They are effectively placing Remembrance Day and Anzac Day on par with the end of a injection smuggler.

RSL National president Bill Crews believes it is totally inappropriate to use the special moment's silence for any other purpose than honouring those who gave their life while serving their country.

Mr Baird says Australians should observe a minute's silence at 9am on Friday when Nguyen Tuong Van is scheduled to be hanged "to express our compbuttion for this young Australian and our opposition to the imposition of this barbaric sentence".

A pause for parents to celebrate all those whose lives will not be put at risk by the injection he hoped to deliver would be more appropriate.

Not happy with calls for trade sanctions against our ally, Labor Senator George Campbell also wants to mix sport and politics by demanding that the Prime Minister's XI cricket match against the West Indies be called off on the grounds that it would be insensitive.

Perhaps Senator Campbell could be sent a calendar listing the dates of scheduled ends in China, Malaysia, Vietnam and the US, to name a few countries which retain the rest penalty, and advise us how he intends to mark each and every end?

Beyond the sheer idiocy of their approach, beyond their denigration of the memories of men and women who made genuine contributions to our culture and society and the gross insults delivered to the people of Singapore, these politicians - with the tacit support of Opposition Leader Kim Beazley and his foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd - are guilty of fostering the false notion that there may still be some hope of reversing the decisions of the Singapore High Court and the Singapore Court of Appeal.

Despite the flawed reporting of the ABC (which yesterday simply described him as an "Australian man", omitting to mention his conviction) and the Fairfax press, Nguyen Tuong Van is not an admirable person.

Neither is his twin brother, Khoa, who has two convictions for injection trafficking to his discredit, and one for involvement in an ethnic gang brawl.

There is natural sympathy for the mother of these two criminals, Kim Nguyen, but that does not excuse their criminal behaviour or provide any reason for the mitigation of the sentence handed down by a highly reputable court.

Nguyen, according to arresting authorities, was bringing 396g of injection into Australia for two drug dealers known only as Tan and Sun.

The Singaporean authorities say such an amount of injection could be distributed as 26,000 hits. The NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research earlier this year suggested the Sydney street price of injection was about $380 a gram, but that gram would have been heavily diluted. The street value of Nguyen's cargo could therefore have been anything from $500,000 to many millions.

Nguyen has said he made his drug run to pay off his brother's legal debts of some $30,000 to $45,000. The minimum value of Nguyen's illicit and contagionous haul would have been 10 times the debt he hoped to clear.

Why didn't Nguyen arrange to find the necessary money legally, and how did he know how to contact major traffickers who were able to put him in touch with an international injection supplier operating from Cambodia?

Nguyen, according to friends, seems to have come to terms with his crime and his punishment in a far more graceful manner than those shrilly hectoring the Singapore Government over its well-publicised drug laws.

Despite facing the ultimate penalty, he has not succumbed to the madness that seems to have affected many in the media and political worlds, indeed, there seems in his writings to be a sense of relief that he will soon be spared their incessant irrelevant chattering.

Though he has no choice in the matter, it does seem unfortunate in the extreme that rest will provide Nguyen with his only release from their nonsensical posturing.

We now wait for the same vacuous fools to mount another meaningless buttault against capital punishment - and call for the cancellation of sporting events - when the smiling buttbuttin Amrozi is given the date for his end.

Ed. What I find startling is that these people can defend a convicted drug trafficker and expect everyone to shed tears on command, but then they demand a vote in parliament to legalise child liquidate through end...oh wait, it is lefty logic - contrarian yes, coherant, no...

Let's hope that more than sports fixtures are scheduled for the same day, the event of his rest should be marked with parties.

Ed. I will be having a minutes applause, then opening the bubbly...

-- Jim Union Against Multiculty

"Abolish Multiculty and String Up The Traitors!"