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Samuel’s Blog Weekly Poll: David Hicks

May 20th, 2007 at 06:12am

I’m pretty sure I used that title last time David Hicks was the focus of the weekly poll, on that occasion we discussed how long it would be until David Hicks would return to Australia, and now it looks like David will land in Adelaide in about three hours. The predictable government bashing statements that we got used to hearing on the news every day a couple months back have surfaced again, but now we have a new controversy for David…the aeroplane he is flying in.

Unfortunately in writing the question I had to choose the tense, and decided on the past tense on the assumption that David will be back in a few hours. I will change it to the future tense if David doesn’t return today.

According to the reports, David Hicks is flying back in to the country on a private jet at taxpayer expense, the cost of which is estimated at half a million dollars. Many of David’s strongest supporters (and I really get the feeling that they are whinging just to detract from the government’s involvement in getting David back, and in effect take full credit for it themselves) claim David should have been placed on a public commercial flight with a security escort, David’s father Terry Hicks even took on the role of psychic, saying that David wasn’t going to do anything.

Personally, I think it comes down to this. David is a convicted terrorist supporter who has spent the last five years in a facility filled with people involved in, and alleged to be involved in, numerous atrocities including September 11. I don’t think there is an airline in the world that would risk having David on their aircraft, not necessarily because of what David might do, but because of what others may try to do to free him from custody. If it were my decision, there would be absolutely no chance of David entering a public airport.

Also, the US government and the Australian government seem keen to keep David’s movements secret (probably for the above reasons), so why would they risk having David on a commercial flight where hundreds of people, including airline staff, would have the opportunity to leak David’s flight details? The same can be said of Terry Hick’s complaint about not being told where and when David will arrive…the governments aren’t telling the media that information, so why would they tell Terry? He would just tell the media anyway.

None the less, it will be quite a funny sight outside David’s rumoured landing site today, Adelaide’s RAAF Edinburgh…all those journalists jumping in to action every time a plane comes near the place.

Last week I ran the following poll:

A fairly predictable response there. The majority of people happy with a pretty good budget, and the rest either a bit miffed about the mandatory election year handouts, or just disagreeing with the government on everything anyway.

For a list of all previous results, see the Weekly Poll Results page.

Samuel

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