Senator Andrew Bartlett
Thursday, November 10, 2005
 
Light some candles in the darkness
The Senate rises again today. Over the following two weeks, Senate Committees will be required to conduct full inquiries into the workplace relations laws, the terror laws and the welfare laws – not to mention legislation enabling a nuclear waste repository to be set up in the Northern Territory. Then the Senate sits again and the government guillotines through every one of those Bills. My guess is that there will be some small improvements made to the welfare laws and the workplace laws before they are forced through.

In the meantime, plenty of other issues go on. I leave the Senate a little bit early today to fly to Brisbane to speak at this year’s ACOSS congress, which has the theme of re-imagining Australian society – visions and solutions. I will be speaking on the possible impact of the new workplace laws on the community sector.

This evening, I will be attending a "Candles of Hope" gathering for Van Tuong Nguyen, from 6pm-6:40pm in Brisbane’s King George Square. People will be gathering there for a few short speeches, and then marching up to the Tower Park, the site of the last hanging in Qld.

I understand there will be candlelit gatherings in various other locations around Australia this Thursday, as the Singaporean Government executes prisoners on Friday mornings. Unless the campaign to convince the government to grant clemency is successful, Van Tuong Nguyen will be executed on one of these Friday mornings in the next few weeks.

I saw in Crikey the other day some statistics that show the Singapore government to be the biggest per-capita executioner in the world (which is easier to ‘achieve’ if you have a smaller population of course). The stats are:
USA: 300 million people/60 executions per year = 20 per 100 million;
Vietnam: 80 million people/60 executions per year = 75 per 100 million people;
Iran: 70 million people/160 executions per year = 230 per 100 million people;
China: 1.3 billion people - 3,500 executions per year = 270 per 100 million;
Saudi Arabia: 25 million people/80 executions per year = 320 per 100 million;
Singapore: 4 million people/30 executions per year = 750 per 100 million people.

Writing in Crikey, Stephen Mayne, suggested boycotting the Singapore Government's huge commercial interests in Australia. According to him, this includes companies like Optus, hotels (the ANA in Sydney and the Park Hyatt in Melbourne), apartments (Australand), flights (Singapore Airlines), shopping (the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney).Among his other comments, he also said “If state governments really wanted to flex their muscles, they simply need to declare that the execution of Van Tuong Nguyen would see Australand banned from winning any more state government contracts. After all, the Singapore Government is currently building the Commonwealth Games village for the Bracks Government. But don't hold your breath for the commercial media to get behind such a campaign given the huge advertising budget of Optus and the fact that it's not an attractive white female such as Schapelle Corby facing the gallows in Singapore.”

I must admit I did give some thought myself as to whether I should advocate economic boycotts – a thought which occurred to me as I was flying back from Ireland a couple of weeks ago on Singapore Airlines (I don’t know if that airline is owned by the Singapore government or not). The main thing that made me conclude against advocating a full-blown economic boycott was that such a campaign would inevitably be focused on saving the life of an Australian. This is totally understandable, but as I’ve argued before we should be strongly opposing the death penalty for everyone, not just when it involves Australians. Whilst it is right to focus at the moment on saving Van Tuong Nguyen’s life, what we really need to do is have a strong continuing campaign in Australia pushing against the use of the death penalty everywhere, including even more significant trading partners such China and the USA.

Update: This post on Ambit Gambit draws attention to continuing pressure in neighbouring nation, Papua New Guinea, to start carrying out state sanctioned executions.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Thursday, November 10, 2005 Permalink
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