True Crime. The Life of Australia’s Mr Big.

31 July 2008

Today we’re talking to the son of Abe Saffron, Australia’s reputed Mr Sin.

Abe Saffron ran prostitution rackets and gambling dens in Sydney for many years, and had relationships with corrupt Australian politicans and police, back in the days of the 1960s and 1970s when politicians and police were corrupt and could get away with it.

They were incredibly brazen. Back in the early 1970s, the premier of the time, who was notoriously corrupt, was being interviewed live on television. He was in the middle of denying that any gambling dens existed in Sydney. Just then the TV host crossed to a reporter, who was standing on the roof across the road from one of those gambling dens that didn’t exist. The reporter was able to show the premier footage of the den, and just as he did it, the camera showed a senior police official going into the casino in his best dress-up clothes. Embarrassment, folks. The definition of embarrassment.

Sydney is now pretty clean, courtesy of some anti-corruption governments, decent police officers, and a population fed up with this corruption nonsense.

All that said, I met Abe Saffron some years back, and I was surprised at how gentle and warm he appeared to be. He was with his wife outside a court. If I remember rightly, they were in the middle of a defamation case against a newspaper. He claimed then, and maintained up to his death in 2006 that he never did anything illegal. As a young reporter generally used to people telling me the truth, I found it hard not to believe him, although I knew what he had done. He was very convincing.

So today’s interview with his son Alan will be enlightening. Basically he admits his father was the godfather of crime in Australia. Never violent like his American counterparts, but still the master of crime in Kings Cross.

This interview will reveal a bit of Australian history, a bit Sopranos, a bit glamorous, and a lot of bad behaviour.

– Phil

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Vale Mandatory Detention

30 July 2008

It’s been the most contentious immigration policy decision since someone decided to keep out the hordes with the White Australia policy early last century.

Mandatory Detention was a scheme, devised by the Paul Keating government to try to stop the flow of boat people coming from the north and landing on Australia’s barren shore. The policy basically called for all such asylum seekers to be taken and locked away in prisons while their applications for refugee status were (very slowly) assessed. This meant that many people who had desperately tried to flee death or persecution found themselves locked into detention centres in deserts, often with inadequate care and facilities.

It was a policy that belied Australia’s self-pronounced ‘caring’ attitude to those in need.

The policy was continued under the succeding government under John Howard, and as the years of detention stretched on, the inmates in some of these centres started, understandably, to get a little ropey. They knew they had entered the country illegally, but at the very least, they hoped that they would be treated humanely, not stuck away endlessly, and treated like murdereers.

Soon the message started to get through to the wider community, and we had examples of the public being at odds with this policy. In country towns all the place, people were coming forward, offering accommodation for the asylum seekers. These caring people were having not a bar of the fears that the boat people were terrorists, trying to get into the country so they blow up the Shepparton or Bendigo Town Halls. These people knew that there was good reason for people wanting to escape the Taliban in Afghanistan, or the regime of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

Yes, mandfatory detention brought out the best of Australian people, if not the Australian government.

Mandatory detention is ending. The Rudd government has announced that soon asylum seekers will be treated like the people they are: people just trying to live.

Australia is not the biggest country in the world, but it knows that humanity starts with one act in one place. Australia did that one act yesterday.

– Phil

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Cadel Evans. I Think I Can. And He Did

28 July 2008

A few hours ago Australia’s Cadel Evans came second in the Tour De France. He was race favourite, but could not quite overcome that monolith that is the opposing CSC team. Congratulations from the Breakfast Club to them.

As for Cadel, it’s a funny thing that some people might consider second place to be nowhere. To them the fact that Cadel beat dozens of the world’s best cyclists, including formidable teams, means nothing. It’s first or its nothing.

Silly attitude that probably comes from old fashioned school days where the first person past the past in schoolyard foot races was the only person who mattered.

Wrong. Cadel Evans has managed, on two consecutive years, to beat almost everyone in one of the most grueling races in history. In single days he had to climb two mountains, and managed to do it ahead of most of the pack.

Coming second in a football final, a tennis grand slam, a Formula One Grand Prix or a golf tournament is no shame. You beat everybody else, and came close to being the number one.

Go Cadel. Aussieland is proud of you. So is this little cyclist who would never have any hope of doing a twentieth of what you can do.
– Phil

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Managing Terror

25 July 2008

Keith Suter is one of the world experts on terrorism. For as long as I can remember he has been used by the media here in Australia every time some terrorist attack happens somewhere.

His is a voice of reason in what appears to be crimes that have no reason.

They do have a reason, he says. They are motivated by one of two things. Racism or Poverty.

Think aboiut it. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy was motivated by Sirhan Sirhan’s fears for his Palestian brethren. The first world war started with an assassination that was similarly motivated. Or in the Occupied Territories in the former Palestine, Arab and Israeli lived side by siude for many years, until Palestinean poverty led to uprisings and then terrorist attacks. The same could be said of the IRA actions in Ireland.

But the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 had nothing to do with poverty. That was simple race hate.

Keith Suter says terrorism will not go away anytime soon. It will be a generational thing. Today this issue will come to the fore with our interview with film director Benjamin Gilmour, who has just shot a movie called Son Of A Lion, which is set in a small village in Pakistan and is about a weapons maker and his son. The father wants his son to go into the business and become a weapons maker too. The son wants to get educated and have nothing to do with guns. What is interesting here is that the other elders in the community all want the boy to have that education. They see no future in fighting and war. Education, they say, is the way out of poverty, not killing other people. Watching the film, I thought about how much money it must be costing them, all those bullets, fired off into the sky willy-nilly. That can’t be helping to put bread on the table.

The elders, as elders often are, are wise people in that little Pakistan town. The big lesson from this movie is that hates of the father should not be visited upon the son.

Amen.

Ridding the world of terrorism will be a generational thing, but it will also require respect of all people for all people. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take too long.

– Phil

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The War in Iraq. Not Quite Endless, But Nearly.

24 July 2008

Yesterday we spoke with Major-General Jim Molan.

His is a name that you may not know. That’s because he is a behind-the-scenes type of guy. But in his case behind-the-scenes refers to deciding strategy for the war in Iraq. You see, he was the Operations Commander for the US, British, Iraqi and Australian troops in Iraq after the coalition invasion. Among the many operations he organised was the deadly in cursion into Fallujah.

The first thing that hits you about Jim Molan is the light in his eye. Here is no idealist or ideologue. He was simply a man doing his job and trying to stop the killing. He has no regrets. He admits that his decisions caused the deaths of his own troops, but he says he sleeps well.

Now this might make him sound at best harsh, and at worst like an uncaring thug, but from what I saw of Jim Molan yesterday, he is a sensitive man who doesn’t really care for the Iraq invasion, or for war in general. After all he, more than most, has seen the worst of war. He has seen friends die. He has almost been killed himself. Like with so many people who have been to the brink, he appreciates life.

He also had a few predictions for the region. He says, first of all, that the war in Iraq will go on for at least ten years. He also says that in Afghanistan they are making the same mistakes that the invaders made in Iraq all those years ago.

Perhaps the adage is true: we learn from history that we don’t learn from history.

Hope not.
– Phil

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