Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, won an electoral landslide in May after pledging to fill funeral parlours with drug dealers. He told Filipinos on the day of his inauguration last month: “If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself as getting their parents to do it would be too painful.”
Since 10 May – the day Duterte was announced the winner of the presidential poll– at least 704 people have been killed because they were suspected to have been involved with drugs, according to monitoring by journalists at ABS CBN News, a Filipino news network.
One influential Philippine senator has called for an investigation into the killings. In a speech before the senate, Leila de Lima, a former justice minister, said: “We cannot wage the war against drugs with blood. We will only be trading drug addiction with another more malevolent kind of addiction. This is the compulsion for more killing.” De Lima, who has also headed the Philippines’ national human rights body, said police were summarily killing even innocent people, using the anti-drugs campaign as an excuse.
A statement issued last week by the citizens’ council for human rights accused Duterte and his officials of abandoning due process and human rights in their zeal to fight the war on drugs. “Units of the Philippine national police, under the command of his close associate General Ronald “Bato” de la Rosa, have turned many low-income neighbourhoods in the country into free-fire zones,” it said.
“The bloody encounters taking place daily have polarised the country between those who support the president’s quick and dirty methods of dealing with drugs and crime, and those who regard them as illegal, immoral, and self-defeating.” The killings appear to have been carried out by police, who attribute the violence to suspects who “resisted arrest and shot at police officers”, and vigilante groups emboldened by Duterte’s promises of impunity.
That's some seriously fucked up shit right there. It's like something straight out of 'Judge Dredd' where the 'Judges' are also jury and executioner. Except that was meant to be a satirical comic book. The Philippines is a real country, so the freak out is real. The murder-spree by state and vigilantes is way beyond the fascist dreams of the most right wing crazies in most developed countries. It's the kind of thing you would expect in the 'developing' world. The question being, what the hell is it developing into?
The reductio ad absurdum of the 'zero tolerance' approach may well be this policy of unleashing police as judge jury and executioner, the rule of law be damned. I imagine he'd argue that it's not worth the state spending money housing drug pushers in prison - it's cheaper to just shoot them. The mathematics of it don't lie but, dude... human rights? It's weird how this crude populism crosses over into the classic asiatic barbarism of utter disrespect for life. You expect this kind of stuff from say, communist China, not a democratic Philippines. Still, he seems like the man on a mission:
Before he was elected president, Duterte was a lawyer who earned a reputation as an authoritarian figure while he mayor of the southern city of Davao. His campaign pledges included the reintroduction of the death penalty by hanging, as well as offering bounties for the bodies of drug dealers.
During the campaign, Duterte said 100,000 people would die in his crackdown, with so many dead bodies dumped in Manila Bay that fish there would grow fat from feeding on them. After his election win, Duterte also launched a seemingly unprovoked attack against the UN.
“Fuck you UN, you can’t even solve the Middle East carnage ... couldn’t even lift a finger in Africa [with the] butchering [of] the black people. Shut up all of you,” he said.
And we're worried Kevin Rudd might fuck up the world as UN Secretary General. The world is laughable sometimes.
The PBO, which was set up to provide independent and non-partisan budget analysis to politicians, did the costings at the request of libertarian crossbench senator David Leyonhjelm, who wants marijuana fully legalised.
If such a policy were introduced in July 2017 it would raise $600 million in GST revenue in the first two years, the PBO found.
That money would flow on to the states but the policy would also help the federal government through reduced law enforcement costs.
The government would save about $100 million a year in reduced Australian Federal Police and Australian Border Force costs, the PBO says.
So tire's actually a money incentive to legalise marijuana that's spelt out in a report. $300m a year is not chump change. That's money right now that's totally underground in the black market so you'd think it would been the interests of the government to stop letting that revenue going the pockets of criminals and put it to good use. There's even a $100m dividend for the savings with the AFP which could be put to use elsewhere. You'd think it's a no-brainer, but I guess it's just too permissive and too hard for conservatives to do it.
In the mean time, there's reports of some idiot kid who consumed "synthetic cannabis" and got himself killed. I guess if you're young, you do these things. But you also think that if marihuana was legalised, then the temptation to put weird chemical cocktails into your system might be significantly lowered.
So there's that too.
When Amanda Writes You Off, Maybe You Should Go, Tony
Here's Amanda Vanstone doing the statesmanly thing and whacking her own.
Unless I have been lied to, and that can happen, Abbott has told a number of people that he is young enough to have another crack at the leadership. Even if that is meant in the most pure and innocent form, as in "Well, the Prime Minister might be hit by a proverbial bus", it does not augur well for the future. It shows an incapacity on Abbott's part to see what went wrong and how much of that related to his own behaviour. It also reveals a failure to recognise that there are others who have come up in the ranks and will continue to so do. It is not a static world through which only he progresses.
Sadly, it would also mean every decision Abbott makes will be firstly about positioning himself for that opportunity rather than firstly about securing a team win now. Political teams are like rose bushes – you have to keep pruning or there are no new blooms. When John Howard gave me the flick in 2007 he offered to say that I had decided I would move on. I declined the offer; the truth is what it is. My press release thanked him and the Liberal Party for the opportunities I had enjoyed and others had missed out on. My spot was filled by Malcolm Turnbull. Pruning delivers results.
Bronwyn Bishop, Philip Ruddock and a few others should stop being so selfish, start showing a bit of gratitude for all they have enjoyed, and allow some new blooms to burst forth.
People might say that "You have had a fair go; now you should be fair and go" sounds harsh. But in this case I think it would be the best and fairest thing for Abbott. And for the party that gave him such tremendous opportunities.
It's kind weird when Amanda Vanstone is the voice of reason, but there you have it. It's noteworthy.
It's A Horrible Year So Far And It's Forecast To Stay That Way
What do you do? The war opened pretty badly for the markets. If anything had anything to do with China, it's been like a baseball bat to the head, although ASX isn't as bad as other markets. It's been pretty ordinary more than anything else. The Santa rally was hardly anything to write home about. The IMF downgraded growth forecasts for the year, with only a month in.
The survey run by Business Day says it's going to stay this way for the rest of the year. It's going to be not enough growth, not enough inflation, not enough employment, but not enough bad news for rates to be cut further. It's enough to make you take up Astrology, apparently.
Of course, Japan's central bank just cut their interest rates to negative, so chances are, there'll be a flood of money form Japan looking at our 2% interest rate thinking it's a great deal.
Over The Ditch And Down The Slope
New Zealand is apparently headed for outright deflation.
A 1.8 per cent slump in tradeable prices drove the weak quarterly CPI number, particularly for vegetables and fuel, where a stronger Kiwi dollar over the period played a part in depressing prices. Domestic prices rose by 0.5 per cent, or by 1.8 per cent year-on-year, thanks to higher housing and airfare costs.
"With dairy prices still sliding, and 2 per cent inflation more elusive than ever, we expect a genuine easing bias" from the RBNZ next week, TD Securities economist Annette Beacher said. "Anything less will reverse today's NZD sell-off, and more."
No government or central bank likes a deflation. The thing is, it's not bad for everybody. If somebody is sitting on cash, waiting for the right price, a deflation is exactly what you want. The corresponding lowering of interest rates to spur you to spend that money is just the government and the central bank bullying you out of your cash position into riskier assets.
Some of these films to do with the war on drugs across the US Mexico border are becoming more and more extreme in their moral relativism. While I'm not one of these people with moral absolutes, I tend to think that if the premise of the film is to do with law enforcement, a film should provide some kind of position on moral reasoning that involves the state. We relinquish capacity for a personal or private war in exchange for justice law and order. Ultimately films to do with law enforcement have to take a position about the operation of laws to ensure order or peace or whatever is the social consensus might be.
Then there is this film.
So here is the obligatory spoiler alert!
What's Good About It
This is tough. I'm not entirely sure I saw a lot that I liked in this film. There are some nice shots showing the Arizona landscape, horizon and sense of the land. The writings isn't witty or sharp (and you really notice this after watching a Woody Allen film), and the directing is pretty ordinary. The sound track is interesting. It's reminiscent of 'Jaws', what with its pounding bass notes.
The story boils down to a CIA black ops unit trying to insert an assassin into a difficult spot, but in order to operate in the USA they need n FBI agent to be there and rubber stamp the operation. The main character is chosen because she's effectively too junior to buck the system. It's good that a female character is doing this kind of role. God knows the film would have been 10 times more boring if it was another young guy again.
Emma Blunt delivers a scowling concerned performance that gives it a joyless reality. Josh Brolin turns in a performance you would expect from him. He is sort of cast-to-type.
What's Bad About It
The film meanders a lot. The action is meant to be driving the story but there's something perfunctory and ridiculous about the movements. Because Emma Blunt's character is kept in the dark for half the film, we as the audience are kept in the dark as well. Much of the time you're wondering what the hell is going on and if it is ever going to reveal something profound. It doesn't. It simply never gets there. The crucial central action of the film does not belong to Emma Blunt's character. It belongs to Benicio del Toro's character, who is as nihilistic as they come.
The nihilism is entirely self-defeating in this film. There is no existential crisis - it's just crisis of faith in the government, but it's not even well explained. You're left with the sense that maybe the film makers don't really care about the underlying social issues in Mexico. After seeing the first season of 'Narcos' and then coming to this movie, you really feel let down with its absence social insight. Lots of people are shown dying, getting shot. You get to glimpse one Mexican cop and his family, but it's probably the wrong story to have focused upon.
What's Interesting About It
That's the thing; it's really not all that interesting, in of itself. It's another film that depicts the war on drugs on the US Mexico border. Yes, it's endless, draining, with terrible human cost. The film simply posits that the state will move into a phase where it will make and act upon amoral judgments, simply to bypass due process.
You rarely see a film where the moral purpose of the action on the screen are not underpinned by something bigger than the individual. If it is a film about the law, then it usually revolves around the moral ramification of how justice is carried out, or the unintended consequences laws, or the practice of law. If it is about law enforcement, they usually mount an argument that lawfulness is goodness. This film says we shouldn't care, we should just do what it takes to get bad guys wherever they are, by any means necessary. The crazy thing about it is that it's not entirely clear how assassinations of drug lords actually helps in a war on drugs. Yet, it is asserted this is the future.
An Ugly Future Of Fighting Non-States
Yes, we're already underway in this horrible little process. Because states fail, like Rwanda and Somalia, they give rise to international players that do not adhere to protocols of a state but exert the kind power that a state might exercise. These independent players are complicating factors for diplomacy. An earlier example might have been the financial power f cocaine cartels in the 80s and 90s, or the Somali pirates in the early 2000s. Al Qaeda certainly fit that bill in as much as it was very interested in international terror, while the current ISIL is a similar entity with roots in terrorism but with aspirations to being an actual state.
When such players enter the international politics, they can be difficult to engage, especially when their intent is hostile and their rhetoric inflammatory. The American track record in recent years i.e. under Barack Obama, has been to hunt down the leadership and then use drone-strikes to kill them. Many people object to this modus operandi because - amongst other notable reasons like collateral damage - it leaves no space for negotiation for the enemy leadership and so the drone-strike program ensures there will be no dialogue.
The assassination plot carried out by Benicio del Toro's character is a direct extension of this program whereby the US Government is willing to kill the leadership of a Mexican drug cartel instead of bringing the man to justice. And this may very well be the protocol that will be used on coming years whereby if one is a Mexican drug lord, there will be no due process and basic rights under the law. The US Government is interested in eliminating such people, not arresting and trying them.
If the film is right, then we've entered a zone where conventional moral reasoning will be useless, and whatever moral reasoning we cobble together will either be inadequate, truncated, or ineffective. If that, is the future as stated in this film, then this film is a bleak film indeed.
Clearly America struggles greatly with this problem. There are no easy answers, although the legalisation and proper regulation of drugs would actually change the economic dynamics of this situation greatly. Just saying...
The Economics Of Narcotics
I might have mentioned this in some other random entry, but it comes down to the fact that narcotics are derived from plant growth. They're farmed. Of all the things that are farmed and collected and sold, the price for narcotics in fact far outstrips anything else. The only reason it gets so expensive is because there is significant demand that is made to struggle for a small supply. The small supply derives out of law enforcement agencies trying to confiscate the contraband. The high prices encourages farmers in impoverished places like Afghanistan or Central America to opt for growing narcotic agents instead of proper crops. As with the bootlegging during Prohibition, the harder the state tries to squeeze the supply, the more lucrative the trade becomes for more parties to enter into the narcotics business.
That's the operational truth of the drug trade. In reality, drug syndicates would be charging what the market will bear, so the pricing of narcotics is presumably at the high end of whatever that can be charged. In that context, every drug bust announced by the police effectively drives up the price per unit weight and this all goes into the drug lords' pockets as profits. Given the above, any film that argues assassinating the drug lords as we do Terror cell leaders is clearly ignoring the economics of the whole enterprise.
When you look at this film in context with other films and TV shows dealing with the influx of drugs over the border into the US, it is clear that the current legal paradigm of prohibition is not working. A lot more money is going to have to be spent on education and rehab programmes and medical processes to deal with addiction than simply rounding up users and dealers and incarcerating them.
Of course, the United States is probably not the likeliest of places for such a radical re-think. That being the case we're probably going to be subjected to ever more nihilistic pointless movies about busting drug lords whatever meaning there waist the enterprise has evaporated out of the topic. There's just a fascist will to prosecute the war on drugs regardless of casualties or meaning.
Torture Is Condoned In American Films
One last thing I want to point out about this miserable film is how the drug lord's brother is tortured for information. The torture is done on US soil, but by Benicio del Toro's character who is amped for vengeance. Taken together with the torture scene at the start of 'Zero Dark Thirty', it appears that while we vocally denounce torture in the West, we're quite okay for it in our fiction. And this hypocrisy is reflected by the state.
It's actually the same old hypocritical split that was pointed out in 'A Few Good Men' whereby the state is happy to appoint a figure to do its dirty work, while claiming the highest of ethical standards for itself. Once again, the split manifests itself with the CIA black ops willing to do the dirty work on the one hand, and the FBI agents wanting to follow the book of the law, finding it hard to condone the CIA tactics. It's the reflected image of 'Homeland', where the FBI are made to look like chumps.
This hypocritical split is not new. When Allende fell in 1973 in Chile, CIA operatives were in there torturing people for information. We might put this down to statecraft, but we've become too accepting that this stuff happens. When it is in our fiction as a readily accepted given, we really ought to be thinking a bit harder about what our politicians are doing on our behalf. The most gruesome part of this film might be its hideous implied politics.
Now, there's a name from the 80s: Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellin Cocaine Cartel. If you wanted the archetypal Columbian Drug Lord, Pablo Escobar was your man. Since he was shot dead in 1993, his fame has receded into the history books as a footnote but while he was around in the 1980s, he defined the sort of drug-cartel-chic of white runners, tracksuit pants and briefcase look.
A whole series about the 1980s Columbian Drug Cartel from their point of view is as unlikely as anything you're likely to see, but here goes Netflix trying to give us a series that shows Pablo Escobar's story. It is radical and weird, edgy and strange, absurd and wondrous, all rolled into one. It is completely unlike this thing here.
Spoiler Alert here.
What's Good About It
For a while during the 1980s, the main plot of many a detective drama consisted of drug busts involving cocaine importation from Columbia. A lot of the time, the busts would consist of tens of kilograms of the substance being worth millions. That was the nominal range of busts. The reality of the scale of the importation is brought to the forefront and it is clear that busting some smuggling operations for mere tens of kilograms was chicken feed next to the metric tons of the stuff that was being moved into the USA, and consumed. The figures are simply staggering.
Central to all of this is a narrative of how the cocaine 'trade' came about and how Pablo Escobar essentially fell into the role of drug lord, merely by being the right kind of smuggler. The complexity of the character and his circumstance are explored in great depth and it is all utterly fascinating. Some of the detail leaves you astounded that the legendary drug lord was in many ways quite the family man, and had aspirations in politics.
Wagner Moura who plays Pablo Escobar is a stand out that holds the series together. With a weird piggy charm and a slouched posture and protruding belly, he is nobody's idea of a dashing crime figure. Maura's Escobar is more avuncular and restrained compared to the imagined figure across so many movies, while also dealing out tremendous violence with an unchanging creepy calmness. He was most certainly a very strange man, and that comes to life in this series. What's truly scary about the portrayal is that we recognise our everyday humdrum in his, juxtaposed with the power that money brings. It was a lot of money, and so it was a lot of power that distorted the nation of Columbia's politics to the core.
What's Bad About It
The narrative is a little spotty and the story jumps through time at irregular intervals. Pacing is a major issue. You get the feeling for Pablo's ascent to being a powerful player in Columbia, but sometimes the jumps forward in time are too radical.
The series also loses touch quickly with the mechanics of the drug manufacturing and smuggling operation in the second half season 1, but presumably this stuff was being made ever faster in greater volume. While the narrator talks the numbers, we don't get to see the mind-numbing volumes being shipped to America. By extension, the series shirks from illustrating the problem with the War on Drugs back home in America and how the US agencies utterly failed to address the size of the demand for cocaine.
We're also trying to understand the Medellin cartel from an American point of view, in having the show narrated by the US DEA agent. The cultural prejudices come thick and fast, but some times you think they're missing something about the whole rise of Pablo Escobar, and how much support he had from poor people.
What's Interesting About It
The thing about Columbia is that it is a smallish country of 20-odd million people in the 1980s. It's about the same population as Australia but the poverty is much worse. The 'Oligarchs' as Pablo calls them are entrenched interests of the ruling elite, who preside over a nation in dire poverty. Then along comes the cocaine trade, and suddenly money floods into this country in a way that not even the financial system can handle. US$60 billion is simply too much to be laundered so they end up having to bury the cash. It is as if out of nowhere, a company the size of BHP manifested itself out of this white powder; and the biggest banks about the size of the Bendigo Bank today.
Looked at another way, it is as if all of a sudden, the USA decided to snort the monetary equivalent of BHP's entire iron ore and coal haul every year. This is phenomenal amount of money that simply dropped itself into the laps of small time smugglers who suddenly grew into the largest industry in Central America. The United States Government meanwhile was spending a lot of money on law enforcement in their 'War on Drugs', but clearly it had very little grip on the size of this demand. If the demand for drugs is big enough, it becomes a social issue; if the supply is big enough to meet the demand, then it becomes an economic issue.
At the crux of the drama is that Pablo wants to participate in the political process, but he is shown the door by the ancien regime. So he sets about shaking the foundation of the country through the sheer weight of money at his disposal. With enough money, just about anybody can be bought. The cocaine trade's annual turn over was so huge, it dwarfed any other industry in the nation. Almost by default, the drug cartels became the greatest export industry of Columbia as well as its biggest rent-seeking lobby.
The War On Drugs
Whether it was heroin that crept into American life through the Vietnam War, or Cocaine that washed through America from Latin America, in each instance the US Government failed to anticipate just how big the problem was and what the nature of the problem happened to be. If it were simply about stopping drug use, there was too much emphasis on busts of users and low level dealers to actually get a view of even an outline on the problem. If they really wanted there to be less drugs in society, they had to address the explosive demand in another way than arresting them and throwing them in to jail.
Instead the DEA sent 2 agents to Columbia, ostensibly to help local police make some arrests, which makes about as much sense as sending 2 people to stop Sauron. Even if in their luckiest moment, should they have stopped Pablo Escobar and his entire Medellin Cartel, there was so much demand for cocaine that somebody was going to step into the breach and keep supplying that demand.
It's not a very popular thing to say it, but on some level, the government has no business intervening in how people choose to entertain themselves. Drugs are stigmatised because of the social problems a drug habit will engender, but it fails to address how much of that stigmatism creates the social problem. With whatever 'vice' there is, prohibition of the vice only pushes it underground, and in the underground is exactly where organised crime flourishes. In one sense, Pablo Escobar comes to prominence exactly because the USA insists on the War on Drugs policy. That dynamic is never clearer than when Escobar is able to dictate the terms of his surrender. Escobar is an American problem that happens to reside in Columbia. The Columbian state is essentially unable to deal with the American problem precisely because it wishes not to be co-opted into America itself.
If the US Government dislikes the Pablo Escobars of this world, it has an interest in trying to figure out a way of cutting demand.
Communism On The Wane
In the series, the US military and CIA are rabidly worried about the minuscule terror threat of communist guerrillas while the massive threat of the Medellin Cartel sits under their noses. The communist guerrillas they are pursuing in the jungles appear to be much smaller fry than than the cartel.
The 1980s of course saw the decline and demise of communism. You can see it in the relative irrelevance of communist slogans and ideological positions relative to the government backed by the military and the Catholic Church. In fact the M-19 - while dangerous - appear woefully inadequate to changing society let alone ushering in a revolution.
The cartel drug money on the other hand lends support to Pablo Escobar's election campaign. It suggests that change in society doesn't come from ideas, it comes from changes in flows of capital. Escobar certainly puts a bullet into Marx and Engels. Columbia was a microcosm of how Reaganomic over-spending essentially blew out Communism and its claims to the future. By 1989 the Berlin Wall came down but the dawning reality of the end of Soviet communism was presaged in the jungles of Columbia in the preceding decade. You could almost say it wasn't about labour; it was about the pursuit of physical pleasures.
In one sense, the people cannot join the communists because it compels them to go way outside of the law and end up camping in the jungle getting hunted down by the government. The M-19 and its ilk were puny and bad persuaders with a bad product. Sex, Drugs and Football, was a much more compelling horizon to pursue for the people around the world.
Columbia, Home Of Magic Realism
At one point the narrator touches upon the fact that Columbia is home to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and magic realism. There certainly is something very magic-realism about the landscape in which the characters move, whether it be the jungles or mountains or across the bridges and through the barrio. Somewhere in the country side is a vision of Macondo in this landscape, that peeps through ever so often. Even the bizarre rise and fall of Pablo Escobar could have been better narrated with the aesthetic irony infused in Marquez's writing and it might have been better. There are certainly, horrors aplenty that need transmogrification through art and language.
In 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', there is a long drought that is then broken with a long rainfall. The appearance of cocaine in the landscape and these people has a similar quality of 'happening'. The absurd juxtaposition of international smuggling of drugs - and the money that comes with it - with the people who are like the simple farmers in 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' makes for tremendous viewing. You can almost imagine Marquez's version of the narrative.
The other part that cannot go without mentioning is just how deep-seated corruption is in Columbia, because of the hold of power by the'Oligarchs'. Because Columbian society in the 1980s had immense disparity in wealth and practically zero social mobility, the society resembled a zero-sum game between the haves and have nots. The appearance of vast quantities of drug money of course shakes this up significantly, but more importantly it exposes why officials were corrupt in Columbia. It would have been too easy to bribe anybody given how little money there was in society. The real threat of Escobar wasn't just that the was a drug trafficker. It was that he was capable of buying out the entire economy of Columbia.
The World As We Find It
It's a strange feeling to watch a series that is at once history but an epoch you lived through. There was no cocaine in my orbit at any pointing time, so it strikes me as a kind of drug arcana that all this was taking place in the 80s and 90s. Still, if you parse through the dramatisation and the editorialising narration, you get the picture of a man who took the world as he found it.
Why do some people become famous? Why do some become infamous? Why do some people ever emerge at all, and others, never emerge? It's one of the interesting aspects to the story, that just at the moment history needed somebody to be the man to front the cocaine trade, there was a smuggler who was ready and able to be that man. Some of it might have been Darwinian section for the most brutal most determined man, but by this account, he was exactly the man to rise to the occasion. It's an amazing thing; he was as right as Bill Clinton was for the Presidency in 1992, or Derek Jeter was, to don a single digit for the Yankees and become a Hall of Fame ball player. The perfect fit, for the perfect role at the perfect time. It's a weird thing about superstardom, and make no mistake Pablo Escobar was his own kind of superstar.
You do wonder how many people in history simply found the opportunity open up before their eyes and were able to capitalise on it. There is no explaining it, which is why we watch in fascination.
I've stayed away from passing comment or judgment on the Corby case in most part because I can remember how Barlowe and Chambers died in the 1980s and think that a jail sentence in the Indonesian jail system has to be much better than the Malaysian noose. The other reason is that the whole Corby family seems to be some kind of feral humanity that brings out the worst snobbery in us all, which in turn brings about the kind of media beat up that Current Affairs programs are so *good* at, and the ensuing media circus is unpleasant to say the least.
Photographs of Mercedes Corby allegedly smoking marijuana and handling drugs in other situations were released in court today during her defamation case against Channel Seven.
The former best friend of Mercedes, Jodie Power, has told the court this week that she had taken drugs in company with Ms Corby and others and had communicated with her about drugs such as ecstasy, speed and marijuana over several years.
In July 1998 they had travelled to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. In Bali, where they had stayed at a resort, they met a friend, Steve Reuben, and Ms Corby and Mr Reuben were photographed allegedly smoking marijuana through a "penis pipe".
The photographs, including one of Ms Corby with the pipe in her mouth, were tendered into evidence on Wednesday by Tom Hughes, QC, representing the defendants in a defamation action brought by Ms Corby.
More photographs were tendered by counsel representing Channel Seven this morning.
Justice Carolyn Simpson said today that although counsel for Mercedes Corby did not approve of the release of the photographs, they had been tendered into evidence and were therefore public exhibits.
Also tendered into evidence in the Supreme Court this week were letters Ms Corby had sent to Ms Power. Ms Power said that the term "mo" allegedly referred to marijuana, "stoned" referred to being under the influence of marijuana, "e's" referred to "ecstasy", and "speed trip" referred to taking the drug speed, which suppressed appetite.
Ms Power said Ms Corby had allegedly taken a drug called "shabu", and she had taken it as well. When Mr Hughes asked what it was like, she said she and Mr Reuben had had "sex all day". Mr Hughes: "It worked."
In one of the letters, Mercedes also said that she was concerned about losing weight and that she was about to go on a speed diet which Jodie Power said was a reference to taking the drug speed as an appetite suppressant.
It's not a nice picture we're seeing of Mercedes Corby as a person. Or maybe I'm meant to simply accept her as the flower of post-modern Australian Womanhood - self-assured and strong, independent, adventurous and not scared of pulling a few bongs.
Or perhaps it really is the case that the Corbys are a pack of drug-fiends. Wonderful. Either way, could things get any richer in the news? But wait, yes they can...
Dungeon Dad
The mind-warping story of the week was about one Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter in a dungeon for 24 years and had her pregnant seven times. Apart from having the most aesthetically-challenged hairstyle to grace front pages in a long time, he did a lot of wacky stuff on top of that.
The children born of the abusive and incestuous relationship between Josef Fritzl and his daughter Elisabeth, and imprisoned in a basement dungeon their entire lives, speak to each other in a private language of growls and gurgles, authorities revealed yesterday.
Both Stefan, 18, and Felix, 5, are hunched from the cramped conditions in their 1.7m high cellar and Felix prefers to crawl, although he can walk. Elisabeth reportedly walks with a hunch and appears decades older than her 42 years. Their sister Kirsten, 19, and critically ill in hospital, has lost most of her teeth.
Chief Inspector Leopold Etz, from the lower Austria region, said he was "staggered" to watch the boys initial bewilderment and shock as they found themselves in a world they had seen only on the television screen in their cell and known from their mother's descriptions about the life she had led until her incarceration at the age of 18.
Inspector Etz said when the siblings emerged from their cellar on Saturday night, they thought they were in heaven, having always been told by their mother, Elisabeth, "heaven is 'up there'."
The children were "wide-eyed and open-mouthed" when they encountered police officers; the first real faces the siblings had seen apart from each other, their mother and Josef Fritzl.
Felix is said to have raised his hand to his eyes at the sight of the sun and then taken it away again, as if not able to believe what he saw.
"When the sunbeams struck his face, he squealed loudly," Inspector Etz said.
He said the two boys spoke their own dialect consisting of gurgling sounds: "To say that the children speak is only a part of the truth. It is a mixture of gurgling sounds and noises, a kind of a dialect of their own.
"When they want to articulate what they say in order for us to understand them, they do make an effort - presumably out of politeness. But it does cost them a lot of energy."
Details also emerged from police interviews with Fritzl of his attempts to maintain a normal life with his "cellar family", watching car races on television with them for hours on end.
The Times cited a report in the Austrian magazine News referring to claims made by Fritzl that he would buy the three children toys and play with them while he discussed their upbringing with their mother.
He reportedly told police he took only three children to live upstairs with him and his wife, Rosemarie, because she would not have been able to take care of another child at her age.
It's just too sick. There's so much wrong with this story, it too probably deserves a song but I'm having a bit of a block trying to come up with a chord progression that suits this subject. How do you play incest in the key of 'C', for instance?
What I don't get is the insistence by psychiatrist that the kids are psychologically damaged. As Danny DeVito says in 'Twins', "Well, Obviously!" What they're not talking about is the possibility that the dungeon kids are sub-normal because they're congenitally fucked, thanks to being products of incest. Why don't they just spell it out?
Anyway, the world is abuzz with the perversity of the whole story so it's not exactly we can tune it out. Wasn't it weeks ago our fragile little minds were warped by the story of the Deaves family where in the incestuous father and daughter claimed they didn't have a problem, but that it was the world that had a problem? *sigh*
It is useful in this context to mention some other things going on in Austria that have been overlooked by the international press - including a series of investigations that threaten to envelop the Austrian police. These suggest a force so allegedly riddled with corruption and incompetence that even those responsible for handling the Kampusch case have been implicated.
There is also the country's apparent problem with institutional racism. There is concern over a number of deaths and injuries in police custody of foreign nationals. (There have been no convictions; Amnesty International has made a formal complaint.)
Then there are the controversial photographs that have surfaced of Jörg Haider, the former leader of Austria's far-right Freedom Party; the increasing tendency of Austrian politicians to sue journalists who dare to look into their affairs; the BAWAG banking scandal - which resulted in the loss of billions of euros in questionable investments - and the revelation in 2006 that this well-to-do Alpine country had slipped five places in Transparency International's corruption index.
There is a theory that Austrian culture is somehow to blame for the cases of child imprisonment that have come to light. Certainly it is true that in two of these cases, neighbours admitted to reporters that they knew the perpetrators and victims of the crimes only by their surnames.
There is a petit bourgeous formality in Austria, a hangover from imperial times, an assumption that a respectable member of the community - a lawyer or engineer, for example - could never be the author of a serious crime. It explains why a mother of three can take her children out of school without generating much suspicion, for instance. And, conversely, why foreigners - especially foreigners of non-Austrian appearance - tend to be treated with, at best, scepticism. A native of Ghana or Turkey travelling on a Vienna tram can expect to have his or her ticket scrutinised by inspectors far more often than white, German-speaking passengers.
Furthermore, Austrian privacy laws ensure that the private lives of prominent people are rarely exposed. Roman Abramovich retreated to Austria after his divorce.
Data protection means that it is virtually impossible to find out simple things: why a person has received planning permission, for example, or who put the advertisement in the newspaper for which only whites needed to apply.
But there is another reason why such crimes can happen in an otherwise affluent and civilised society. When neighbours of the middle-class lawyer noticed that she took meals only in her car, for example, the authorities were promptly and repeatedly informed. But, for reasons we may never know, they refused to act. No police officer or social worker was forced to answer for having failed to intervene.
It's certainly interesting. Why do these things happen in Austria, home of Adolf Hitler? Or is it one of those, "you just can't say that!" kind of comment? Let's face it, I think Austria has gotten off lightly for giving us Adolf Hitler, its contribution to the NAZI thing and 'Sound of Music' thing. What if Arnold Schwarzenegger is the best thing they've given to the world, apart from... okay, Mozart. What if there really are sinister social forces in Austria that give rise to Adolf, Kidnappers and Dungeon Dad?
Speaking ahead of tomorrow’s first anniversary of the night her blonde girl disappeared, Kate told The Sun: “It proves that people can go off the radar, doesn’t it? But they are still there – and you owe it to that person to keep looking. It gives you hope. It’s horrible to think of the length of time, but Elisabeth being found gives you hope.
“It could be today, it could be tomorrow, it could be next week. You just have to hold on to that hope.”
I guess that's the kind of world it is. Maybe it's not just Austria - People get locked up in dungeon basements for years and years like Natascha Kampusch , the Fritzl Dungeon Kids and Kasper Hauser. It's simply a dog-keep-dog-in-a-cage kind of world. Just ask my parrot. He says "oui oui!"
