AN Abbott government would buy three unmanned spy planes to use as weapons in its pledge to turn around illegal boat arrivals.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said the Global Hawk surveillance aircraft – costing between $40 million and $100 million each – would provide early detection of asylum seekers.

Because that is the rational thing to do. Spend $300 million on planes to catch leaky boats. In fact why stop at planes? I think we need surveillance satellites, the full resources of the navy and the air-force and the army and while we’re at it LET’S BUILD A GIANT WALL!

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: What happened to political discourse in this country where refugees are talked about like pests?

This year will be the first federal election where I will be able to exercise my democratic right to decide if I’d rather a turd sandwich and a giant douche, and I feel like it is a really bad election to pop my voting cherry with. I would have liked the 2007 election. Government change, revolution, excitement. Howard lost his seat after almost 12 years. Sure, the man we replaced him with turned out to be a giant douche, but we didn’t know that for sure at the time.

But this year, we have Rudd vs Abbott. We have seen them both in government before and they both stink. Hooray for democracy!

Also in that same story: Abbott can’t think of any reason not to sell uranium to India.

In the ex-Portuguese territory of Goa, an opinion writer by the name of Joe D’Souza, writing in the Herald, has written an honest report card on the country he loves, and I’m wondering what the reaction might be if a similar article appeared in an Australian paper.

India has come a long way since it declared itself as a Republic. We can boast of our education, which has produced internationally recognized space scientists, software engineers and doctors renowned in every field of medicine. Slowly and steadily India is marching from being a poor developing country with a begging bowl to be a super-power of today with a global reach. India recently played an important role in the discussions regarding climate change in Copenhagen at an international summit on global warming.

Indian entrepreneurs have done wonders to establish empires in other countries, acquiring thus the status of being multinationals. But looking at the other side of the coin, we in India often wonder if the rich in own (sic) country have done enough to usher in social justice with a sense of corporate social responsibility to week out economic disparity, acute poverty and raging hunger amongst over 300 million poor people of our country. We see all around us economic disparity growing alarmingly, thus allowing 10 per cent of our population, in charge of over 70 per cent of the nation’s wealth and nearly 50 per cent of our population barely sustaining themselves on a daily basis. Though we pride ourselves on having sent an unmanned mission on the moon’s orbit, we have to hang our heads in shame that each day millions of our countrymen have to sleep without a meal and also without a roof over their heads.

Yes, we are a free country but should we not work to stop exploitation and enslavement of our fellow human beings? Or should we remain quiet, callous and unconcerned about the rampant acts of corruption, nepotism, discrimination, exploitation and goondaism growing in our society? No doubt we have a long, long way to go before actually realizing Gandhiji’s dream of a prosperous and just Indian nation.

We in India often preach high ideals and conveniently forget that it is we who have to practice what we preach. We denounce child labour but do absolutely nothing to economically empower the poor children to go to school. We condemn abortions but we do not consider it a social responsibility to take care of the children born to poor and infirm Indian parents. We want our house to remain clean yet find it appropriate that our garbage should land in our neighbour’s property or street corners.

Un-Indian!