executing a policy

In the hours since the execution in Singapore of heroin smuggler Nguyen Tuong Van there have been predictable reactions from the usual bleeding hearts. The trade union movement has threatened legal action against Singapore Airlines. If that happens then they should also take action against Qantas. I mean, our national carrier flies to the United States and more than thirty states there have the death penalty.

And throw your Optus mobile phone into Albert Park Lake because that phone company is owned by the Singapore Government. And don’t turn your lights on today or use your electric stove because virtually all electricity delivered in Victoria is from a Singapore-owned company.

And while we are at it, in this emotional outcry over one drug runner, you should check out your kitchen and your wardrobe. If any appliance or piece of clothing has the words “ made in China” on it you’d better ditch it. After all, the Chinese execute more criminals than any country.  They even used to make the executed prisoner’s family pay for the bullet.

I am amazed by the blinkered outpouring of support for a calculating, selfish drug pusher who took a risk in a foreign country and got caught. And paid a dreadful, deadly, price. He knew what he was doing. I believe his family – mother included – knew what he was doing when he made a drug run to Cambodia. His twin brother, Khoa, originally feigned ignorance. I believe his brother’s death is on his head.

You must have noticed his sounds of silence since all this happened. He did not even visit his twin once in jail in three years until days before his execution. If Nguyen was such a cleanskin how did he make contact with a heroin trafficking gang in Melbourne or Sydney? How did he get the money for the trip to Cambodia? How did he pay for the drugs there?

 Supposedly it was all done out of brotherly love to pay Khoa’s legal fees and gambling debts. The legal fees were stacked up when Khoa amazingly managed to evade a jail term after chopping up a teenager with a machete on Reservoir station.

Ask why the Australian Vietnamese community has not been vocal about the Nguyen case. They are a close knit community. They know this family. They not what thugs and  hoodlums and drug pushers they were.

And yet, as his death approached, Nguyen was treated like some Vietnamese Mother Theresa. People ignored the fact that the heroin strapped to his body and in his back pack was enough for 26,000 hits. And it was aimed at the veins of Melbourne users.

In recent days I have been called a heartless bastard with ice in my veins but those talkback callers haven’t see the e-mails and letters from heroin victims’ families. A mother who found her son hanged in the garage in the midst of his addiction. A man whose nephew bashed an old lady to get her pension money from her handbag. And from her injuries and the shock of the attack she suffered a heart attack and died.

And yet there they were at St Ignatius church in Richmond on Friday. They rang the bells 25 times – once for every year in the life of a drug smuggler. Maybe they should have rung them a thousand times for his possible victims. Judging by the reverential coverage you would have though they were covering a Royal funeral. Former Governor General Peter Hollingworth was there. As I said on AW I wish he had paid that much attention to victims of sexual offences in his church when he was an Archbishop.

And speaking of 3AW: I said on air on my last programme for 2005 on Friday

“I am disgusted with this radio station today. I am glad this is my final programme for the year because in my current mood I am not sure I want to come back.”

3AW is a multiple national award-winning radio station. The best news and current affairs station in Australia. And yet at 9 o’clock on Friday morning we dropped our news service to pay tribute to a convicted heroin trafficker who was caught in Singapore with enough smack to maybe kill hundreds of addicts on the streets of Melbourne. News is news and must be sacrosanct. It is precious. And at nine o’clock last Friday morning on my radio station it wasn’t. And that angered me and it saddened me. A serious radio station would not even stop the news to pay tribute to a 106-year-old Digger who fought for this country. To do it for a  heroin pusher is a travesty. To ask for a minute’s silence was a travesty. Ask the RSL.

Speaking of travesties, the comments from Robert Richter QC, leading a minute’s silence from lawyers outside the County Court on Friday, were obscene. He claimed what happened to a heroin dealer in Changi was worse than what POWs suffered there in World War Two. Australian and British soldiers were starved there. Were tortured there. Were worked and beaten on the Burma railway until they died. He should hang his head in shame.

And think of this: The 3AW breakfast team of Stephenson and Burns – who shellac me every chance they can -- have been running promos about how they are off to Vietnam. What hypocrites! Hasn’t anybody told them that Vietnam has the death penalty? Shouldn’t they light candles and boycott that country?

Luckily I went off air on Friday for my Christmas break. By January I may have calmed down. Have a happy.

December 4, 2005

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2005