How about if you are a bus driver, going about your bus driving business in Brisbane and a passenger boards your bus, pours a fuel all over you and flicks his Bic lighter at you and you are burnt to death. This happened a day or so ago in Australia. Facts are yet to be revealed, but what I guess is that a mentally unwell person saw the Sikh bus driver as a Moslem and has picked up via media that Moslem is bad. There may be a better explanation or even the truth.
Immediately the Queenland police said there was no evidence that it was a race hate crime, but I am not so sure and neither is his family back in the Punjab and quite rightly, they are asking questions. Government, government authorities and organisations who depend on government funding like to keep a very tight lid on racial issues in Australia.......and I would go as far saying that includes our ABC.
R got stuck into me for being so cynical and not believing what the QLD police were saying. I confess, at times it must be hard to live with a cynical smart arse like me, but I reckon I am right in this case..
Vale to Brisbane bus driver Manmeet Sharma. You seem to have been a good person and I can offer no explanation for your horrific death, aside from what I have said above and that won't offer you much comfort. At times in this world some really bad things happen.
I don't like being cynical, but one thing to say, it is so great when your cynicism is proved wrong and you have a restoration of faith in humankind. I try to avoid cynicism in my personal life but at times I don't succeed. Sadly that happens so rarely when talking about public figures, the police, celebrities, government, employers and those with a vested financial interests.
The highly respected John Silvester is a long time crime investigator and reporter for The Age. This is from today's paper. I can only conclude that this story from way back then is correct and nothing has changed my mind since, that governments and a police have changed. Improved perhaps, but changed, no!
It is so good that we don't live in a corrupt country (insert sad and laconically tired face emoticon). Read more at The Age.
The man on the other end of the phone didn't need to waste time with an introduction. His opening sentence was direct and to the point: "The people you are writing about could kill you stone dead."
This observation immediately gained my attention, because I recognised the caller as the director of the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence who was also my father, Fred Silvester.
The reason for the call was that I had written a story that certain NSW police had advised Mafia boss "Aussie" Bob Trimbole to leave the country rather than risk having to give evidence to the Stewart Royal Commission on drugs.
Trimbole took the advice (there were others urging him to take an extended holiday) and in 1981 nicked off, dying six years later as a free man in Spain.
The story created a furore in Sydney, sparking the then NSW commissioner, that plodding plodder Cec Abbott, to declare the story false and malicious, while the police minister did the same.
I was interviewed by two embarrassed NSW detectives who showed a staggering lack of curiosity, and within a week this internal inquiry cleared everybody of everything.