Fairness and Gross Understatements

"The system did not adequately deal with the individual, there is no doubt about that."
"We do need to know why the perpetrator of this horrible outrage got long-term residency."
"We particularly need to know how someone with such a long record of violence, such a long record of mental health instability was out on bail after his involvement in a particularly horrific crime."
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott

"The new Bail Act amendments will ensure that an offender charged with being an accessory before the fact of murder will be forced to show cause why they should get bail."
"It is our intent that offenders involved in serious crime will not get bail."
Brad Hazzard, New South Wales attorney general

One of the Lindt Chocolat Cafe workers makes her escape. Picture: AP Photo/Rob Griffith Source: AP

Man Haron Monis was removed from a government terrorist watchlist some time in 2009. He was obviously on that watchlist for a reason. That reason might have had a great deal to do with his having odiously and often loudly proclaimed his commitment to jihad, of course. When asked just why it was that the man wasn't on any national security watchlist, Comm. Andrew Scipione, commissioner of the New South Wales police, responded that charges against him were not politically motivated.

Of course the charges were those of rather egregious crimes. Murder, for one; the murder of his ex-wife. He was convicted of criminal harassment of families of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan to whom he wrote obnoxiously horrible letters of condemnation. His appeal of that conviction was lost three days before he took 17 people hostage at the Sydney cafe.

And then there were the charges of sexual assault, over forty counts in total, involving seven women. His live-in girlfriend, a Muslim convert, is accused of having stabbed the man's former wife 18 times before burning her to death in April 2013. But this man, charged as an accessory to the murder, and the woman charged with the death, were both out on bail. Because the magistrate granting them bail commented that to do so represented a "simple matter of fairness".

The best part of all of this is that despite the criminal activities and the charges emanating from them, and that Man Haron Monis had at one time been on a national terrorism watchlist, he was granted permanent residency in Australia. Police, according to Commissioner Scipione, had asked that Monis not be granted bail in  he murder case, but the court in its wisdom ruled otherwise.

After the fact, however, the New South Wales government seems prepared to revoke bail for Mr. Moni's girlfriend, the charged murderer, Noleen Hayson Pal. Which seems so unfair, given that she must surely be in mourning after the death of her cleric lover.