Lamar Ahchee’s Bali arrest will prove frustrating to many Australian taxpayers | David Penberthy
And still there are Aussie families in desperate need of government help overseas who do not get it, writes David Penberthy.
National
Don't miss out on the headlines from National. Followed categories will be added to My News.
To use one of the great Australian expressions, Queenslander Lamar Ahchee is in more trouble than the early settlers.
The 43-year-old was arrested in Bali last week on charges of attempting to smuggle a hefty 1.8kg of cocaine into Indonesia, with a street value of $1.1 million.
Ahchee insists he had no idea that the two Lindt chocolate boxes he collected from Ngurah Rai Airport in Kuta contained drugs, and was simply retrieving them for somebody he knew only as “Boss”.
All sounds pretty plausible.
While he tested positive for cocaine at the airport, and has argued through his lawyer that he is battling drug addiction, Ahchee insists that he is not a drug trafficker.
There is a certain moronic tedium to all this, isn’t there?
It is impossible to comprehend amid such thoroughly documented risks of taking, buying or selling drugs in Indonesia, that so many people still take such dopey risks.
It’s not like Indonesia makes a secret of its attitude towards those who support and take part in the drug trade.
There are gigantic yellow billboards in every Indonesian airport featuring a large image of a gun and warning: “This country executes drug dealers”.
Nothing too subtle about that.
Equally, thanks to Schapelle Corby and the Bali Nine, everyone in Australia who pays even scant attention to the news has seen evidence of the toughness with which drug dealers are treated though the Indonesian court process and upon their incarceration.
We have all seen suspects paraded around for the cameras, and prisoners housed in tough conditions at Kerobokan Jail.
The results of taking these risks – up to and including execution – are a matter of record.
And the amount of drugs allegedly being trafficked by Lamar Ahchee meet the threshold for his execution.
You really need to be an A-grade drongo not to get the message.
Through his defence lawyer Ahchee seems to be hoping that he can pull off the same legal miracle achieved last year by Port Lincoln man Troy Smith who was arrested in Bali with 3.15mg of methamphetamine, the penalty for which was 12 years jail and a $740,000 fine.
Smith argued successfully that he was a meth addict and that the drugs were all destined for his own personal use.
In a rare display of mercy, the Indonesian courts instead sentenced him to spend six months at an addiction treatment centre in the Balinese capital Denpasar. He was home in South Australia by Christmas.
It would be a miracle if Lamar Ahchee can achieve the same lenient outcome given the amount and type of drugs allegedly being smuggled – vastly more than the amount with which Troy Smith was nabbed.
If there’s one feature of these stories that grinds the gears of many Australians – this one included – it’s the presumptuousness of these wrongdoers that they will be able to rely instantly on the taxpayer-funded assistance of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to extract them from a pickle of their own making.
It explains why there was such little clamour or happiness over the vast and expensive repatriation effort mounted by the Albanese Government last year to bring back the remaining members of the Bali Nine.
I never saw any polling on the question but my hunch is that most Australians wouldn’t have much cared if the Bali Nine actually remained in jail in Bali for the rest of their lives.
Lamar Ahchee has become the latest dopey Aussie to put his hand up for consular assistance.
Maybe I’ve had a compassion bypass. Maybe you don’t want your government to leave you high and dry – or potentially in Ahchee’s case, leave you for dead – by withholding any assistance before you’ve even been found guilty.
But when you have been found guilty, I think many Australians struggle to understand our unyielding generosity on behalf of all these halfwits who are incapable of working out what the gun is alluding to on those big yellow billboards.
The most galling feature of it all is that there are some Australian families who land themselves in strife through no fault of their own overseas, yet miss out on the extravagant care afforded to those who’ve done really dumb things, as per the Bali Nine members with their publicly-funded airlift back to Oz.
I have become mates with a bloke called Greg Jenkins whose mother Anna was murdered almost 10 years ago in Penang.
Greg and his sister have had a hellish time trying to get straight answers out of the Malaysian authorities as to how their mum met her fate.
She was a completely innocent Australian grandmother who was in Penang visiting her frail and ailing mum in a Georgetown nursing home. She died in what Greg suspects was a robbery gone wrong.
Greg has made more than 40 self-funded trips to Malaysia off his own bat and has been rightly vocal about the limited assistance he has received from DFAT and the AFP.
Perhaps they’d be getting better help if they’d been at the centre of a major drug smuggling conspiracy.
There are more than a few Australians who get the violins out for these drug peddlers.
But most of us I suspect would actually be happier with an Indonesian-style hard line approach to the drugs scourge than the mollycoddling, the excuse-making, the second, third and fourth chances that passes for drug policy and enforcement in Australia.
Here, people involved in the trade are seen as victims of circumstance.
The Indonesians have a more clear-eyed view that they’re the architects of their own demise, and a menace to everybody.
More Coverage
Originally published as Lamar Ahchee’s Bali arrest will prove frustrating to many Australian taxpayers | David Penberthy
Dad’s funeral refusal ‘discrimination’: court
A man has claimed he was subject to religious discrimination after the government refused to pay for his deceased father’s Greek Orthodox funeral when he could not afford it.
Dad’s funeral refusal ‘discrimination’: court
A man has claimed he was subject to religious discrimination after the government refused to pay for his deceased father’s Greek Orthodox funeral when he could not afford it.