GoogleBomb success!
and hit ‘I’m Feeling Lucky.’
Congratulations to web authors involved!
(from penguin.invisiblegovernment.net again)
So it worked. It took a while, but it worked. And Eugene’s escaped a jail term, though there’s now a royal commission.
I’m always dubious about attacking court case proceedings, and to be honest feel a little odd about what happened with the Google-bomb, but hey. Mike Rann may be scoring political points off the whole thing, but I still think that what happened was an absolute travesty. Though in hindsight maybe better to have waited for the verdict to do. My bad. Anyway..
His defence was partly based on the fact that he was distressed after defending the Snowtown murderers. Fair enough. Of course that’s highly distressing.
But what of the automatic right to drive? If he was that ‘distressed’, and had been drinking, he simply should not have been driving. The right to drive is the right to be in control of a ton of steel travelling at over 100km/h. This is not a right that should be given lightly, and certainly not judged automatic. The risks involved when the driver is not at their best are not ‘acceptable’. They are not par-for-the-course.
It’s another case of true-cost-analysis, really. What is the value of someone driving a car? What are the costs? How does the potential cost of someone being killed weigh up against the ‘value’ of getting to work quicker / not having to wait for a family member to drive you home / ripping up, degrading, selling off public transport infrastructure?
There are orders of magnitude of difference. It just doesn’t add up. Considering that someone has an automatic right to drive no matter what mental state they’re in, and that mitigating circumstances (had a few drinks, was distressed..) are acceptable, well, it’s just not a value judgement I can reconcile.
