Thanks Aaron - People can disagree without resorting to insults.

Yes. I thought the Ferrari analogy was too tortured for comment.

These are good points (beginning of thread) in favour of my argument.

"Laws protecting human rights, in my opinion, supersede national laws." - AndrewH

"Following your logic(?) we should not have intervened in Germany during WW2. Some basic understanding of the totalitarian government in Singapore would immediately signal to the most ordinary of Australians that an international expression of decency is required -especially where domestic populations are gagged under fascist rule.

That he appears to be guilty of a criminal offence does not mean his citizenship in this country and his rights as a human being are cashed in. You have a very bloody minded sense of democracy and civil society." - Rainier

Rainier's 'tone' is not directed at you :-)

"We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal."

- Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail
http://www.nobelprizes.com/nobel/peace/MLK-jail.html

Congratulations Hellothere on your well thought out and touching post.

An important, if not critical element of the Western system of justice is that a victim, or family and friends of a victim, are prevented from judging or sitting on juries in a defendant's trial.

The reason is very obvious. The victim and/or parties associated with the victim, will not be able to objectively or rationally consider all the evidence in a trial.

An example would be where your child was injured or killed by a driver of a car. If you are like me, you will, at least initially, feel a terrible pain that you will want to alleviate by taking counter-measures proportionate with your loss or pain - and not proportionate with the crime.

It is only by objectively examining the relative harm that drugs, alcohol and tobacco cause, that we can properly assess the response we take to their production, trafficking and use.

It is easy to say that if its legal its OK. But legal behaviour that causes great harm should perhaps be more controlled and illegal behaviour that causes less harm (such as drug trafficking and use) perhaps should be considered for less control.

If the harm a behaviour causes is not the measure of our response to the behaviour, what is?

Andrew

Lets hang lesbian whales in old growth forest.
I guess Mr Nguyen shouldn't have stuck his neck out. There is absolutely no truth in the rumour that he has had fan mail from lipton jigglers. Some people would describe his treatment as a brown collar crime. But these comments make me ropeable. Frankly, it is the best bit of noose I have heard in a while. And that is not stretching the truth. I suppose we can all now appreciate the gravity of his crime. And it just goes to show that you can never get the drop on the hangman.

See it soon on a soap opera near you, "The life of Troung". Cheer up Troung, its not so bad, always look on the brighter side of death, (da da, dada dada dada) before you draw your last terminal breath (da da, dada dada dada). As Ned Kelly said, "such is life". But gosh, gotta go now, do drop in some time.

A compliance of a particular national legislation with international requirements is one story.

Another story is picturing a convicted drug trafficker having intentionally participated in an illegal international business, which is the drug dealing, being a victim of a bad law.

Duralex rex est rex- Bad law is a law anyway.

To Space Cadet.

Sneaky Peter based his argument upon a statistic which was clearly wrong. I suggest that whoever gave you your statistic knew that he was preaching to the converted and that you would not bother to verify if it was true.

To Crocodile. I was once a Soldier (trooper,actually) in the Australian Army. I was taught how to kill people who were the enemies of my country. I do not make much distinction between internal enemies or external ones, other than I might have a lot more respect for external ones. If I had been unlucky enough to be called to the colours in wartime, I suggest that my chances of getting killed on behalf of my community to be very high. I consider that the chances of myself, or a family member, being wrongly charged with abduction / murder or Heroin trafficking to be non existent. To combat the crime wave that is gouging $32 billion dollars from the Australian community every year, I would consider such a negligible risk to be well worth it.

To Hellothere.

The logic of your argument indicates to me that you are either dishonest or desperate. Smoking has been fashionable and acceptable for 500 years so simply banning tobacco is not an option. Most smokers begin as adolescents. A 14 year old girl does not smoke her first cigarette then overdose on nicotine and then die on the spot. But this can, and does, happen with 14 year old girls trying their first hit of heroin. 14 year old girls are not noted for prostituting themselves for cigarettes or for committing serious crimes of theft to support their habits.

The responsible adults who make up the majority of the Australian electorate do not consider tobacco as being any where near as bad as heroin. We the responsible see it as our duty to support laws that protect both our children and our less intellectually endowed adults from the consequences of their own youth and stupidity, which we the responsible usually end up paying for anyway

Who were the enemies of your country, Trooper Redneck?