When I was young, a great many years ago, we had drinking under age of course, but I can never recall actually going out with the intention of getting paralytic drunk. Naturally I have been drunk but this has usually been as a consequence of the good company and not noticing just how much I indulged.  Even today I enjoy a drink but avoid over imbibing, it causes me too much agony!

Taking these matters into consideration, I have come to the idea that the reason for my more controlled drinking for pleasure must be due to my earlier life experiences when very young. So what is the difference in my early upbringing and the upbringing of to days youngsters,

The thing that strikes me as a big difference in our upbringing is the lack of over protection which my generation had to put up with. I started school at 5 and at 5 and a day I was walking to school on my own, together with a lot of other children in the area plus an older sibling. We lived in London and this meant that we, in the winter months walked home in the dark, with only good gas street lighting. After dinner, we all played out in the street and wandered over quite a large range of the area.

At 7 whilst playing jumping the rope ( in the street of course ), I landed on the taut rope and double fractured my arm. The kids accompanied me home where my mother got the local scout to splint my arm with a couple of bits of wood from the back garden, then Mum and I took a bus ride ( two buses ) to the hospital where they X-rayed the arm, said how good the scout was and put it in plaster and sent us home. No sedatives for me and Mum had a cup of tea when she got home.

A couple of years later, the world decided to have a war and the children in the cities were evacuated. This meant being taken away from home ( Mum’s and Dad’s ) and being located elsewhere in the country with strangers, known as foster parents, I had 3 such moves and they each had their own problems but we managed.

Whilst evacuated we still walked to make-shift schools in church halls and the like. On one occasion a German aircraft returning from an overnight raid on London, saw us going to school and actually machine-gunned the street. Fortunately, no one was hurt and when we reported the incident to the then foster parents, they commented how lucky we were to have not been shot and simply sent us to school again the next day

Eventually, I went back again to London where the air raids were still going on and after school we now had a more adventurous play ground, we had all the bombed buildings to play in. And so life went on till we were adults, to us this was about 15 at the earliest and 17 at the very latest. We certainly never considered ourselves as children at 17, and because of our actually having to deal with the every day happenings from a young age, we were really quite street wise and aware of how easy it was to get into difficulties and therefore, we could handle the responsibility of every day living, including drinking.

Now days, because of an unhealthy fear of paedophiles and the like, we have children that are lucky if they can get out on their own at the age of 12. Furthermore, all challenging activities are removed for fear that the children will be injured and someone will be sued for some unreasonable compensation. All this over protection denies our children their right to grow and experiment and develop the ability to handle the every day challenges that they will eventually face.

It seems to me that we have got to overcome this unreasonable fear of paedophiles and encourage our children to get out and develop. Statistically, there is next to no chance of a paedophile  interfering with our children between home and school, especially if there are a few hundred other children all travelling in the same direction. Recently there has been a couple of reported cases of men trying to drag children into vehicles but the children have been able to make enough commotion to abort the efforts. Statistics show that there is only 3 main ways of limiting the abuse of children and these are to stop sending them to religious schools, stop sending them to community camps and the scout like organisations, and the most common place of abuse is at home so you have to avoid leaving them alone with any male members of the family. It would be considered unreasonable if one tried to enforce any of these three solutions.

Seriously, I think that we must start to raise our children so that they are aware of the various aspects of life and trust them to have the answers from their every day activities. I think that parents have trust the intelligence of their children and do what the parents of old did, they told their children that they must never go with strangers and pointed out any persons in particular that they, themselves,  didn’t trust. I get the impression that the poor kids of today are academically very able and can cope pretty well; however, they have very limited social education and have absolutely very little idea of self responsibility. I believe this to be because they have been mollycoddled for too long when they should have been encouraged to be more daring and self-reliant.

All this crap about lowering drinking age and making closing times earlier is just cosmetics which will have only the effect of making more under age drinkers and more drinking in parks etc. Also all the talk about the police getting tough and having more power to close premises etc, is just going back to the 60′s when the police had the powers and were, therefore, open to corruption and bribery. The police have the authority now, and what it needs is the backing of the courts and the parents to bring these wayward children ( as we now call 16 and 17 year olds ) into line and make them realize that they have to live within the bounds of the law and, more importantly, the norms of society.

My rant was a consequence of coming to the conclusion that present day politicians would override any legitimate legislation to suit their political aims without regard to justice or the rule of law. It also seemed that there is no  sound constitution or bill of rights setting limits to the extent to which the government of the day can over ride existing legislation to obtain its own political aims

It was and is my conclusion, that because the law makers are the politicians, and because the politicians have to go to the people to be re-elected and because the politicians have no set restrictions on their legislation, then they will enact the laws that are politically most expedient at any one time without regard for the long term consequences of any such legislation. This enables any rabble rousing tabloid paper to put pressure on the government of the day to make a headline without regard to the consequences of issuing such rubbish.

It was my conclusion that to obtain really safe legislation, free of political exploitation, it is essential that we have a genuine overhaul of the existing constitution and add to it a bill of rights. Unfortunately, I haven’t kept a record of the press releases referred to but I trust that this addition will somewhat clarify my earlier rant.

The latest of these ” lynch mob ” type interferences by weak and popular vote catching politicians is the Victor Chan killer release  on parole case .  I can understand the family of Victor Chan being annoyed by the release of Lim on parole but they are naturally biased, most normal people would be quite prepared to kill someone that had killed their father in cold blood for no reason other than to make money. However, such emotions will, if unchecked, lead to never ending killing where everyone is trying to exact the revenge that they feel entitled to   To stop such lawlessness we have a the law of the land which is administered by qualified and, we hope, unbiased and wise legally knowledgeable Judges.

Unfortunately, the laws of the land are formulated by politicians and these seem to have no back-bone and are only looking to get re-elected.  As a consequence, the laws of the land are frequently manipulated by rabble rousing daily papers which rouse the mob instinct of the populace and pressurize the politicians into making dangerous laws which eventually will be used in a way that they are not intended.

Lim was sentenced under the law and it is proper that that sentence be enacted in accordance with the judges sentence. We have to presume that the judge, who probably listened to days if not weeks of testomony, will have taken all things into consideration and arrived at a judgement that was as just as could be humanly expected. It is absolutely stupid to allow some elected politician to toss the law out on a whim to aid in his re-election prospects.

It is obvious that we need a new constitution that protects the people not the States, which seems to be the main function of the present Australian constitution. It is possible to argue that we would be better off as a country of Australia with one government and not have all these divided loyalties to various States. We also need a Bill of Rights which sets out clearly what the politicians can do  legally. At present, each political party in power in the Commonwealth and States and Terrortaries can enact any law as they see fit, or so it would appear.

An example of this abuse of power is the special laws enacted against the paedophile Ferguson, his crime is one that is most distastful but he is entitled to the protection of, and justice from, the law. Once he has finished his sentence and provided that he complies with the law, then he is entitled to his liberty. If we have a problem with this, we should change the law to take into account the circumstances of various crimes.

I understand that paedophilia is a complaint for which there is no cure. If this is so, then we have to adjust the law to permit the euthanasia of people that have this affliction or adopt the less humane option of shutting them away for life in a, usually, most unfriendly prison. It is certainly not acceptable that we should enact laws that relate to individuals, there is no end to the possiblilties of giving politicians  such powers.  Also we have to accept that if we allow a paedophile to have his freedom after a prison sentence, then we have to allow him to have the means to support his life style and work etc to feed himself, it is inhumane to expect that he will sit down and starve himself to death to avoid contact with his fellow human beings.

We have to have a system such as a Bill of Rights and a person orientated Constitution, to ensure that the laws that these politicians enact are not just political ploys to appease the, generally ill informed, public.

I have listened to people like John Howard argue that if we have a Bill of Rights the power will rest with the judiciary rather that the elected parliament. This is a valid arguement but we need to set out what the politicians can do and have the judiciary administer those rights, the judges don’t have to present themselves to the people for re-election every three years or so. Having seen the way in which our politicians have behaved with their strutting the stage to show that they are the stronger on crime  and punishment, I’d have much more faith in a judgement by a judge even though I know that the judges are appointed by the politicians in the first place.

From past judgements in the High Courts we have seen that judges don’t always go the way that one would expect knowing their political persuasions. By comparison we have the rantings of Rees and O’Farrell both of whom seem to think that the Daily Telegraph has some credibility, a belief that is most difficult to understand.

I still can’t understand why it is that we are supposedly so well educated but we don’t think beyond what we are told and just follow like sheep and allow the dismantling of a legal system that has grown and proven itself over many hundreds of years. We should be looking to improve and widen our liberty and rights rather than trying to persecute those that have fallen foul of the law and suffered the consequences thereof.

It is obvious that the US under the direction of Bush is only interested in finding Hicks guilty of something, just to make it appear that the US is superior to all and needs to pay no heed to international law or justice.

Unfortunately, we have a gutless government which is only interested in dancing to Bush’s tune and not to defend the rights of our citizens. I fail to see how Hicks can possibly maintain any sense of reality or hope for a future when he faces such an apparently all mighty and soul destroying persecution by governments which should be protecting all the worlds citizens from injustice rather than concentrating so much evil force against one individual!

This seems a strange claim to make since we Australians have been paying big bucks to obtain Australian Passports for our security when travelling abroad, why if our Government has no obligation to afford us protection from wrongfull incarceration or other infringements of our safety

It appears to me, that we should not only have stayed with a foreign head of state but have also returned to being part of the British Empire. At least with a British Passport, one has some protection when travelling as is proved by the fact that there are no British detainees in Guantanamo Bay

Mr Rudd responded “he would take advice from the attorney-general’s department. “That’s the proper thing to do and that is precisely how I would act,” “. A good answer but it has one shortcoming as observed by Mr Howard.

Mr Howard noted that “the response was not good enough.”, and I must agree with him. If Rudd is faced with an Attorney General as ignorant of the Australian law and the application of the presumption of innocence and correct gathering of evidence, as Mr Howard has, then Mr Rudd’s cause is lost.

This farce has gone on long enough, Hicks is doomed to get a Life Sentence, even if the US has to eventually charge him with jay walking, so why can’t the Australian people start to enact the much vaunted ” Australian Mateship ” and act to protect a fellow citizen from a great injustice and have him returned to face a fair trial here where the rule of law applys, we hope.

For Hicks to have a fair trial it is first necessary for any such trial to be held in a proper court where the laws and rules of law are respected and apply to all persons.

This court that Howard is prepared to accept is a court set up specifically to find Hicks, and the others being held, guilty of something and then being sentenced to life imprisonment. It has nothing to do with justice as recognised in any of the civilized countries.

Hicks may well have trained in terrorism etc but if the civilized world is to protect it’s standards of justice and libery, it is essential to ensure that Hicks is, firstly charged with a proper crime, and then to ensure that he is given a fair trial in a properly constituted court of law.

I feel that there is more at stake here than Hicks innocence or guilt, at stake is the whole credibility of the legal systems of the USA and Australia. To date the outlook is pretty sad for the future of our justice systems.

There is not even a pretence of there being any presumption of innocence until found guilty nor any relationship to any recognised law covering the particular circumstances. Infact every impedement seems to have been put in the way of the defence to ensure that it can’t obtain a fair trial.

I’m sure that future generations of both Americans and Australians will feel nothing but shame for the way in which our two governments have dealt with these matters.

An ordinary man devotes 20 years of his life to a company and then that company is under no obligation to see that he has a fair deal and a chance to continue his life in some degree of comfort as a reward for his service.

This is from a politician that at the end of his political career, soon we hope, will want a pension of several thousands of dollars a year for the rest of his miserable life. I still can’t understand how ordinary working people can vote into power these people that have never done a day of labour in their life and are prepared to screw down anyone that does have to work for a living.

This man claims to be a believer in the teachings of Jesus but hasn’t any understanding of the meaning of charity or compassion, the man, like most of his coleagues, is a monster.

I was stunned when I heard these two senior politicians state that we couldn’t do anything for David Hicks because he is technically not guilty of any crime and therefore cannot be tried and found guilty here in Australia, his own country.

We know, because of the US High Court decision that the holding of Hicks is illegal, that he cannot be tried in the US and found guilty of any legal infringement. We also know that he hasn’t committed any international legal crime so he cannot be tried in an international court. However, he can be tried in a Kangaroo court set up by that champion of freedom and civil rights, George Bush. Bush like Ruddock, has already stated that, even if Hicks is not found guilty against all odds, he will still not be released, so the whole exercise is a travesty of justice.

I feel ashamed that we have allowed this to happen to fellow citizen!

Not only have we allowed it to happen, we even have people and talk-back announcers condemning Hick and this is before he has even been charged. What a way to defend our freedom, I’m sure that it isn’t what the Anzacs fought for!