July, 2012

These are the first pictures from Australian airspace of Indonesia’s front-line jet fighter, the Sukhoi SU-30, four of which landed at Darwin’s RAAF base earlier today to take part in Exercise Pitch Black 2012.

This was not a one off, it was not just an uprising by a few upset because they had been left out of government, Timor is not a failed state, it is an experiment for a failed global system. The problems of Timor are a symptom of a wider problem initiated by the UN, the World Bank and the IMF back in 1999, the painful process of structural adjustment, of primitive accumulation and the manufactured creation of a middle class, in order to make Timor another piece in the global Empire of a failed economic system.

Definition of Buju: Good looking person (Australian Aboriginal Slang) Derived from an Australian Aboriginal language it was also used as another word for vagina. “He/She is a real Buju.” See more words with the same meaning: vulva (‘vagina’), female genitalia.

I’ve been back from Dili for a few days now and hadn’t thought about the mass grave for a few days until last night when a report came in from the Jakarta Globe that a total of seventy two bodies – up from earlier estimates of thirteen, twenty four and fifty two – had been located in the mass grave outside of the Palacio.

At the time I came to the conclusion that the ‘cooling-off place’ had been designed by the same architect that had designed Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay. The several strands of barbed-wire at the top of the chain-wire mesh fence, the padlocked chain on the gate and the spotlights surrounding the Spartan building are reminiscent of TV images I had seen during the time that David Hicks was receiving similar consular assistance from the Australian Government as Julian Assange is currently receiving.

We may be saving money for the next generation but now is it not too hard to take that money to free the 150,000 families from poverty? The idea of saving this money for the “next generation” is a big problem when all we are doing is condemning that generation to even greater poverty.

Superintendent Jones told Cavanagh that she had: “… raised watch house staffing concerns with several senior officials but was ignored … she was distressed about the watch-house being manned by only junior, inexperienced staff and by the constant rotation of staff through the facility. Superintendent Jones told the inquiry her recommendations to change staffing conditions had been met with reactions ranging from “dumb insolence” to outright refusal.”

Sternly worded letters to administrative staff of such corporations and combative encounters with shop-front staff, are only likely to have one outcome; the closure of such facilities to birders. Shop-front staff find dealing with insistent birders just as onerous and boring as birders find the process themselves. With management fielding complaints from both sides, it is easy to see the most expedient course of action for them to end the problem altogether.