Croc country
The dude who was on the menu of the croc up north should spend the rest of his life kissing the ground of the brave lady who rescued him walks on. If it'd been me there, I'd a waved him goodbye from the back of my ute where I'd a been camped, anywhere within cooee of water, in croc country.
As for the gutless garbage who are now encouraging Beattie and his merry band of environmental vandals to wantonly slaughter every croc in the north, just as he's doing to the dingos in the state, I say, "beg, borrow, or steal a gun put it into your mouth and blow the top of your head off! You're unwanted human trash!" If crocs were eating a thousand humans a day, we had no more than 110,000 babies born a year, it would still take crocs 40 years to cull the human population of Australia to anything like an environmentally sustainable level.
When Australia has a population which continues to believe the propaganda that the major parties are the only political game in town, return a low life like Howard to power four times, then to top it off, give a right-wing bunch of religious nutters the balance of power in the Senate, it's humans who need to be culled, not crocks!
Frank Brown
Langshaw, Qld
Haiti
Isn't it odd (though hardly surprising) that America, which invades Haiti more or less regularly every three years, on whatever pretext, cannot apparently cough up a little money to held the starving victims of the hurricane which recently destroyed the town of Gonaives? Possibly American taxpayers are too busy paying for Bush's crazy adventures and murders in Iraq?
Rosemary Evans
St Kilda, Vic
Refugees
There is a surreal silence hanging over us as we await the results of the election for the Senate but in the meantime there is a question or two left hanging as well. Did all the refugees get released from Baxter, did the Iraq war end, has everyone in the country gone into a coma?
I have a serious problem, a problem that has cost a family more than two years in detention and separated. Over the last 15 months I have spent an inordinate amount of time in the Family Court and the Federal Court of Australia listening to hours and hours of hearings and decisions for the Bakhtiyari family. The results of those hearings that started so well turned into a nightmare of appeals won by Ruddock and the continued incarceration of the family.
However, the results have thrown up several things that were unknown. Apparently DIMIA relied on Pakistan documents that were 30 years old but have since been declared as false by Hassan Ghulam of the Hazara community. Two eyewitnesses placed Mr Bakhtiyari in Afghanistan when the Taliban came but they were ignored, the department had details of Afghani ID for the entire family and it was ignored so it is strange that they are still locked up.
Except that the reason the court was told is because of the article by Russell Skelton which states Ali is from Afghanistan. While cleaning out the rubbish, I found a copy of a map drawn by Ali that was published in the July 26, 2002 Australian by Ian Gerard, plus a confirmation by two hired interpreters that Mrs Bakhtiyari is Afghani.
Problem is that when I compare that map to the place Russell Skelton couldn't find Ali, I see that Russell was about 100 or more kilometres further north, which would explain why no-one recognised Ali.
Marilyn Shepherd
Kensington, NSW [Abridged]
Outraged
I am totally outraged by something I just read. The High Court, has "upheld Parliament's right to hold children in immigration detention". (Since when was it anybody's right to treat people inhumanely?) And why you ask? A simple technicality in the Migration Act. Apparently it doesn't "differentiate between children and adults". That's odd, the legal system never has any problems with that when they want to put guilty people in jail. How come the same rule doesn't apply to getting the innocent out?
Sure Beslan was shocking, but how hypocritical to say that it was horrendous and to think that detaining young children behind razor wire is any different! Are the politicians totally heartless, or just plain stupid?
Annette Pritchard From Green Left Weekly, October 20, 2004.
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