Your say: Two readers weigh in on Indonesia's executions

PM opportunistic

HOW embarrassing for Australia on the world stage with the performance put on by our Prime Minister and Julie Bishop after Indonesia carried out the sentences of the two drug smugglers caught attempting to ruin lives.

The ordering of bringing home our ambassador and other mooted penalties for enforcing the sentencing of death for peddling death was spoken about and acted out like two children would.

Now that all of the drum banging is over with that lot will Mr Abbott turn the drum band's attention to China and America for their similar actions of having "death rows" and capital punishment, and maybe bring our troops home in protest and not just an ambassador?

I doubt it, no, I know he won't.

Why is that so? Are those people's lives not as sacrosanct or was this just another voter stunt?

Where is the drum banging brigade for the Australian victims of these two drug peddlers?

What is being done for those victims? Nothing, zero, squat - they are ignored by the same government who spent millions on the guilty. How sick is that?

Where was the media investigation into the damage done by them to Australians?

Just how much does this government spend "fixing" the mess after Tony Abbott speaks on the world stage, for example when he states on national television with words to the affect watched by the younger generations "You know if they were sentenced here in Australia for their crime of importing drugs they would be out of prison about now after 10 years".

What a great message to our young - "sell your drugs here, it is safer and you won't be executed". Talk about being dumb.

Tony Abbott is an embarrassment and I ask he show the same commitment to all countries who have capital punishment in law to prove he is not just an opportunist.

STEPHEN BEIGER

Burnett Heads

Cultural differences

AM I alone in seeing Indonesia's latest atrocity as not being about the death penalty or drug trafficking but all about grandstanding and political point scoring?

The conceit, arrogant posturing, smug rejections, insults and inability to honourably deal diplomatically were all meant to prove superiority instead demonstrated regression.

When travelling to a country to commit a crime that carries the death penalty, the perpetrator does so in full knowledge of the consequence, weighing the risk against the gain.

A sovereign nation has the right of its own laws and the treatment of its citizens and anyone within its borders but it's measured by how it does this.

We can't expect anything other than the 10 years of drawn out torture that was always going to end in execution from a nation that has no value for life.

The routine cruelty shown to animals that have their leg tendons severed to immobilise them and then have their throats slit while still fully conscious to bleed out in agony and terror before slaughter is seen as acceptable as is leaving its aged and infirm to beg on the streets to survive while corruption fattens its ruling classes.

Those that would have us absorbed into Asia need to come to terms with the fact that there are some cultural differences that cannot be bridged.

We can choose to turn a blind eye thereby condoning them or disassociate from the contagion.

OLGA GEORGE

Berajondo