What a revolting farce. Given their mentality, it is no surprise they stuffed up and every reputable journalist and columnist in the country now adds different bits and pieces that gives an unsuspecting public a unique glimpse into the hidden world of consent manufacture and audience capture and commodification, tabloid style; a mentality expressed best in the contemptuous reference to stressed people involved in hard situations as "the talent".

There as absolutely no doubt that the basis for this episode and others is a sort of judenhecht, applied instead to Arabs and Muslims. This massages bogan fears, particularly amongst women. The failure to balance, as a show like 4 Corners might do, is naked evidence of a profound dumbing down of content for a preconceived out come, thus audience dumbing down.

Isn't this a bit cruel and unnatural, this ramped up anxiety developed in an info vaccuum? To what point.. audiences bonded to the show through crude soap opera, with a predictable demographic delivered to advertisers?

But what use does it do for our society when its location relative to reality in a real world becomes so severely compromised that a flilm crew thinks it can pull such a stunt in an other country, surely this is at the height of delusion.

You can wonder from this point whether a better informed public would vote for those who farm out privatised detention camps contracts, complete with victims, worth $ billions and then laws that suffocate press freedom to obviate scrutiny of corporate activities?

A fearful, mushroomed public allows, for the want of some sort of challenging of false memes and paradigms and reorientation to real issues, a situation where the country is open to corporate criminalty for which the poor benighted fools must then pay and be trained to like, paying for.

@ Yabby

"So what will the father be charged with? He took these children from Australia, in the good faith that he would return them. "

Yabby,if you can remind me what the offence the mother who removed 4 daughters from their Italian father's home, was charged with, I'll probably be able to answer your question. That mother was assisted by the Australian Embassy in Rome.

Roscop, I can't remind you of anything, as I don't know anything about the case which you mention. All the details would have to be examined, as we are doing in this case, for anyone to pass informed comment.

Yabby,

"All the details would have to be examined, as we are doing in this case, for anyone to pass informed comment."

Ok, so I take it this is uninformed comment:

"I don't blame the mother for trying to retrieve her children, what would you have done in the same situation?"

But as the to your question, I guess I'd just have to suck it up like Australian father's are expected to do, when the mother nicks off for good with the children (and hoovers the home) whilst the father is at work. Happens every day in Australia. I don't think it makes any difference if the two parents are in different countries or different suburbs.

Roskop, well in this case the mother clearly did a stupid thing in actually trusting her ex husband to keep his word and return the children, as had been agreed. So if anyone has kidnapped them, it seems to have been him.

Yabby, as far as I know the father has not broken any laws. I think the mother obtained custody after the children returned to Lebanon where they had spent most of their young lives. The mother has a 3 month old baby to another man yet I don't think she is divorced from her estranged husband in Lebanon at least. Does that make her an adulteress? Father apparently is not happy with his children living in another man's home.