To: Alexander Downer, Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs
Re: Singapore Government's plans to murder Van Nguyen on December 2, 2005

You say Labor and other parties are "childish" in the way they press for Australians to try to assist Van Nguyen. The Prime Minister wrings his hands while assuring us that this is all a good lesson in why drugs aren't good for us, and why being naughty in countries with laws of their own is a bad idea (duh!) (in making statements like this, he merely strengthens the Singapore despots' hand, by allowing for the validity of their brute enactment of their own ill-gained power). Perhaps you and Mr Howard are sincere in your expressions of sympathy, etc. etc. But when are you going to act like men? At the moment you merely insult us by staking some self-congratulatory high ground of "dignity," rather than stand up to the Singapore government and its real intent, through its draconian legislation and wholesale murder of prisoners with relatively minor convictions: simply to anathemize and terrorize the country's citizenry. That, plain and simple, is what their laws are about, as the self-justifying, self-empowered murderousness of despots always is. It seems that either you know that, and are being disingenuous, or you don't see that because you are blinded by some belief in the ultimate rightness of power and its exercise.
Whatever the case, your failure to make that point – to shout it out to the government of Singapore in a way that gives heart to the oppressed people of Singapore, let alone some hope to Van Nguyen and his family and friends that his life may be spared – speaks less to your "adulthood," surely, than to your cowardice or moral myopia.
Please stop wringing your hands, and ACT!