With the US election over just wait for the next media sensation. The hotels in Jakarta will be filled with Australian journalists ready to give every gory detail about the death of the Bali Bombers.
The Bali bombings are the gifts that keep on giving for the extremists. Getting constant air play by Australian media, it is unlimited free advertising for an abhorrent cause. I’m not the first person to ask why should we give these people what they want? Why should make them feel like martyrs for a holy cause?
Turn on the TV at 6.00pm and you will see wall-to-wall coverage of their execution. I just hope that none of the networks are crass enough to launch into the obligatory one- hour special Bali Bombers: The Execution. It will be a sad indictment on Australian media if someone was to win a Walkley Award for this.
Two years ago we were quick to run to the defence of a young Australian in Vietnam. As we speak our government is trying to lobby the Indonesian government to repeal the death sentence given to a group of Australian drug smugglers. And yet at the same time it was the feelings of many Australians that the Bali bombers should be executed in the most brutal way possible.
How easy would it be tell a young mind that Australians only care about themselves, they want Australians to live but they want Indonesians to die.
My biggest fear is that such coverage will give this nation an insatiable blood lust for capital punishment. Heaven forbid, should a similar terrorist attack come to our shores, will the death penalty be back on the table for those convicted of the crime? Federal and State governments have already changed the laws to meet ‘exceptional circumstances’ and ‘changing times.’
What would qualify as sufficient involvement to warrant the death penalty? Making a bomb? Delivering a bomb? Lending a SIM card? The Federal police have already shown their ‘expertise’ in their ability to resist political pressure and their tendency to apply the premise that you are innocent until proven guilty.
The history of the death penalty in this country is hardly pristine. Doubt still resides around the conviction of the last man hanged in Australia. How can we be sure that any judicial system will be infallible and yet condone such an irreversible punishment?
For those of you who are religious out there, you must believe that eternity and all that it offers can wait for a few more years. For those of you who aren’t, you can hardly be satisfied with giving religious zealots exactly what they want. | 
