Socialist Party Australia - Report of Schapelle Corby meeting

Last week the Melbourne City branch of the Socialist Party held a public meeting on the Schapelle Corby affair. Here is a report of the main points raised in the lead-off...

Opinion polls say that 93% of Australians believe Schapelle Corby is innocent. The trial has been the number one issue of discussion in lunch rooms around the country. No case has caught the public's imagination in Australia since the Lindy Chamberlin trials in the 1980s.
Why is this? There is a feeling amongst ordinary people that "it could have been me". There is anger at Federal government indifference as well as the hypocrisy surrounding this case.
There has been a spontaneous outburst of public action, with web sites and petitions created, calls to boycott Bali, and even death threats to Indonesians in Australia. This is despite the Coalition and Labor encouraging people to butt out of the issue.
What are the facts? In early October last year a 27-year-old woman, Schapelle Corby, caught a plane from Brisbane to Syndey and then transferred onto a connecting flight to Denpasar Airport in Bali, Indonesia. She travelled with her 17 year old half brother and two friends. She was to stay with her sister, Mercedes, who lives in Bali with her Bali partner.
Corby has no record of drug use or criminal activity or evidence that she lived the life of a drug trafficker. That didn't stop the Murdoch-owned Weekend Australian headlining a front page article: "Meet the Corbys", outlining the fact that her father had a minor charge for marijuana use in Queensland in the 1970s and that a brother is in jail (on non-drug related offences).
At Denpasar Airport, Corby was asked by Customs officers to open her body board bag and they found 4.1 kgs of marijuana in a plastic bag. Corby denied it was hers and has consistantly done so.
There is a prime facie case in both Australian and Indonesian law to charge Corby on the basis of finding drugs in her property.
Since the S11 attacks on the USA, the Indonesian and Australian governments have said they have stepped up airport security. Yet X-Rays taken of bags at Denpasar were not kept. There is no CCTV at the baggage handlining area. Col Bambang Sagiato, Senior Officer of the Balinese Drug Squad, admitted this was the major weakness in the prosecution case.
In Australia, Corby's bags were not weighed or X-rayed at either Brisbane or Sydney airports. Video footage of the bag at Brisbane Airport was wiped out on November 2nd despite Corby's defence team requesting access to it on October 14th.
Corby had made no attempt to lock her bag or hide what Bali Customs officers said was an overwhelming smell from her bag.
Requests by her lawyers for the inner bag which contained the drugs to be fingerprinted were ignored. In fact the bag was presented in court and touched by several court officials!
It has since been admitted that on the very day Corby passed through Sydney Airport, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) were involved in an operation against airport staff involved in smuggling cocaine. 1 baggage handler has been stood down since then, and 25 others are linked to the affair.
Yet AFP Commissioner Mick Kelty still claimed that Corby's defence was "not supported by evidence".
The Bulletin magazine has outlined amazing revalations of how people involved in the illegal drug trade use internal airplane travel to transport drugs throughout Australia.
John Ford, a remand prisoner in Port Philip jail, was presented to the Court by the Corby defence. He claimed to have overheard a conversation between two fellow prisoners outlining how one had planted the drugs in Corby's bag at Brisbane Airport which wasn't picked up at Syndey Airport and consequently travelled onto Bali meaning disaster for Corby.
Ford claimed the drugs were owned by Ron Vigenser. Since returning to jail from Bali, Ford has been bashed twice and is now in protective custody.
Queensland is a center of marijuana production in Australia and is then transported to other cities. It is well known that some baggage handlers use bags leaving Brisbane Airport to smuggle drugs to other Austalian cities.
The Socialist Party rejects the war on drugs as pointless and unwinnable. It is a tool of repression and in some countries is used as a cover to attack the left. We stand for the decriminalisation of the use of drugs and a move to seeing drug use as a health issue, not a law and order issue. We do not in the slightest condone or encourage drug use.
In Indonesia the war on drugs is a political tool for the elite to divert attention from the social problems.
In Australia Howard has made no criticisms of the handlining this case, the outrageously long sentences for drug-related offences in Indonesia, or the conduct of the police investigation. He does not want to upset the Jakarta ruling class for reasons of economic ties, and strategic influence. Indonesia is one ruling class in the region which is less against Australian involvement in regional forums than the likes of Malaysia.
Howard says the trial and appeal must finish before he can say anything. But that wasn't the story when he pressurised Jakarta to arrest and re-arrest Abu Bakir Bashir who he believed was responsible for the Bali bombing.
The Australian government (both Coalition and Labor) see their role, like all capitalist governments, to represent the interests of the capitalists in Australia. Therefore they have been hand-in-glove with the counter-revolution in Indonesia in 1965-66 where over 1 million communists and workers and poor farmers were murdered, and later in the invasion of East Timor and the splitting up with Jakarta of the oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea.
SP can't say for sure if Corby is innocent or guilty. However the case exposes the real interests of Canberra. The dilema the Government faces is the twin and opposed pressures it is under - not to alienate Jakarta while having to deal with domestic public opinion.
A government that provides assistance to citizens in crisis overeas - without fear or favour - will only come when we have a government that is not representing the interests of a greedy, minority capitalist elite. That is a socialist society.