#auspol

Feeling very wow many disappoint such auspol? This is the thread for you. Please catalogue your disappoint here; preferably with links to news sources (so those poor Americans can understand what we're on about). No endorsements of a particular party, side of politics, or piece of policy allowed. Flaming or getting hot under to collar is totally fine so long as you meet the following criteria:

1. Target is not a member of these forums;
2. Target is involved in auspol;
3. You explain/justify your impotent rage using words with no less that fourteen syllables. Or with news articles/facts. MS paint drawings are good too.

Example:

 

>wasting time on some drug smugglers in bali
>auspol the movie

 

@Reudh posted a fantastic rant in the old fags convo recently. I'd share but rage like that it too golden to cheapen by stealing. Grace us with your insight and acrid criticism, O Reudh, Lord of the Rant.

 

don't even get me started on this thing

friggin'

okay so to understand the predicament Chan and Sukumaran (sp?) are in, we have to understand Australia's response to the Banda Aceh tsunami in 2004. We sent enormous amounts of aid to them. As Indonesia is a largely Muslim country, the "giving of gifts freely from the heart" meant a lot to them, and our standing in their eyes improved - maybe we weren't colonialist Westerners with superiority complex. We might simply have been citizens of the world who gave freely to their neighbours kindly.

so in comes Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran with their heroin to be smuggled in. Indonesia tries them harshly as they did any of the other Bali Nine. Sentences them to death where the others got life or 20 years in prison, so that's a little ouchie.

Australia comes in wanting to intervene. Rudd-Gillard-Rudd and later the Abbott ministries plead with the Indonesian president, but don't manage to get very far. Y'know my personal view is that Chan and Sukumaran should rot in prison for what they did, but definitely not die. The misery they could have inflicted with the imported heroin outweighs in my mind their redemption - even if they are truly repentant.

Conservative leader Joko Widodo arrives in the parliament raring for a fight.
Julie Bishop as Foreign Minister and DFAT do their best to appeal to Widodo for clemency, to change their sentence, as they did for other convicted Australian drug smuggler Schapelle Corby.

Along comes the Mad Monk. Ties the treatment of Chan and Sukumaran and the other Bali Nine to the aid we gave them.

So suddenly, the implication is thus:

our worst citizens are worth more than the help we gave you when yours were dead and dying and distraught

Really, no wonder Indonesia dislikes us

 

http://www.smh.com.au/world/bali-ni...sunami-of-asylum-seekers-20150310-140dhn.html

Blerg. D:

Amusing imaging Tones trying to deal with the catastrophe said tsunami would represent for him; but am simultaneously enraged and devastated at the use of countless human lives (both asylum seekers and the Bali nine) as chips in a sickening game of dick-measuring & one-upmanship.

In the words of an acquaintance: Fuck. Fuck everything.

 

Slightly off-topic (but very interesting non-the-less):

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-26/zhang-indonesia-likely-to-execute-more-foreigners/6263122

 

Widodo's a conservative in an already fairly conservative country. And it's not Australia who wants our $1 billion we sent to them in 2004 back, it's just Abbott. Fuckin' Abbott.

 

An acquaintance mentioned the notion that Widodo was doing it to garner political support at home in the same way Abbott is fucking with powerless foreigners in Nauru to win brownie points with xenophobic and/or sadistic, overly conservative, wackjobs in Aust. :v

 

Undoubtedly, they're both arch-conservative heartless shitlords.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/australi...paign-to-save-their-nauru-school-from-closure

Fuck this country. Fuck it good and hard. Preferably with the new THD controller. D:<

 

Western governments as a whole have become more conservative in the last fifteen years, but Tony Abbott is a fucked up man.

 

Not that the offerings from Labor or the Greens are any better, really. :<

 

That's for sure. Did you hear about the moderate party Malcolm Fraser was working on before he died? It'd would've shaken things up quite impressively had he lived long enough. :(

 

What? No. Damn, that sounds like it could have been fantastic. RIP Fraser. :(

 

Here: have a look at this.



Also this.

Some policies would have included:

• ending Australia's close military alliance with the United States
• a closer relationship with South-East Asian nations
• ending the offshore processing of asylum seekers
• stronger anti-corruption and transparency laws
• tighter regulation of the sale of arable land

In other news:

Kevin Rudd stepped up to call for more democratisation of the ALP and removing union thuggery.