NEWS: Light Foot or Loose Cannon? Australian Senator's Awfully Big Adventure

POLITICS: Light Foot or Loose Cannon? Australian Senator's Awfully Big Adventure

Ross Lightfoot, a federal government senator in Western Australia, Australia's far-away-from-anywhere state, has apparently had not just some interesting times away in the Middle East recently, but has kicked up a storm upon arriving home this week, much to the embarrassment of the Prime Minister.

Woodside Petroleum is not enjoying the attention. (Free registration: Use SGNews/SGNews]

And the Federal Opposition is now looking into what kinds of investigations might be launched into the Lightfoot of Arabia Affair.

Meanwhile, in The Australian newspaper, where the story originally broke, Middle East reporter Nicolas Rothwell came out to confirm that he too had had a conversation with Lightfoot during his travels that confirmed the original version.

Curiouser and curiouser.

So... He gave a bunch of money to a children's hospital?

While packing a .38, apparently.....oh the humanity!!

This guy sounds cool.

if i were carrying a ton of money across a war torn country i'd like to have some protection too.

I'd need two .38's to feel safe with that amount of cash ANYWHERE.

Well, it's illegal in Australia to do so.

Imagine if a US senator went to Amsterdam and publicly smoked a big joint. Sure, he wouldn't have broken any Dutch or US laws in the process, but do you think people would let it pass without comment?

He wasn't in Australia at the time though, was he?

I think, more to the point, he seems to be treading on thin ice regarding the smuggling aspect. The first story mentions that you need to get clearance to carry that much Australian money out of the country (hence smuggling), regardless of whether or not you're packing a.38 as protection from… I dunno, what's a .38 going to do in a country full of people carrying semiautomatic rifles? It seems like a bit of a stupid move, IMO.

It's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

That being sai, he really probably should have left it up to his security detail.

[Edited on Mar 22, 2005 11:21AM]

Regardless, what is at issue is the smuggling. The .38 is just the cherry on top.

Yeah, when breaking rules...it's best to only break one rule at once.

Gee, acting all innocent especially when you have a weapon and a ton of cash on you really won't get you very far, it seems

Um, well, yeah.

There's questions about who sponsored him to be in Iraq in the first place.

About him carrying money out of the country on behalf (it seems) of a large resources company.

The discrepancies in his story upon returning home. The PM, the head of his party, was sure looking a bit uncomfortable about the whole thing, to say the least.

(By the way, I submitted this story days ago - I was convinced it had vanished under the radar.)

meh, seems okay to me. smuggling money to a children's hospital really doesn't rank too high on the corrupt-government official-o-meter. as for packing the heat, can't think of any better place to be armed than iraq. i'd shake the guy's hand.

oh, and the funds he used to get there, from a hydrocarbon research facility...those are the good guys too. seems like a lot of robin hood-like crime, which i fully support.

That's who sponsored his trip.

Yeah, I was just trying to at least get the conversation moving toward the right tip of the right iceberg. You could also add his failure to disclose changes in his holdings with various companies.

Then again, maybe he'll get strung up for the .38 and the rest will get swept under the carpet.

It's appreciated.

If the last election hadn't given the government a clean sweep of both houses, this would likely be Senate Enquiry stuff.

Not now though.

OK, you don't seem to be getting it. He evidently illegally couriered a large cash donation for a private interest to curry favor with a foreign power while a representative of the Australian government. Thats not Robin Hood, that's a massive conflict of interest. Imagine if you will Halliburton paid for Tom DeLay to go to Iraq to secretly make a large, undisclosed cash donation to a government with which Halliburton does and hopes to continue to do a massive amount of business. He wasn't being a philanthropist, he was being a bagman under cover of his elected and therefore diplomatic position.

right right. but you see, i don't care about other theoretical situations. this guy donated money to a children's hospital. he did it illegally, yes. and, yes, others can use the same means to reach results that could be very harmful to others. but as the french say: c'est la vie.

people use power and deception to achieve many goals, usually resulting in negative consequences for all save themselves. i can only say that if these behaviors exist...as they always have in the history of civilization (no matter how many laws get passed or how many learned people speak against it), it is nice to see that at least once in a while somebody uses this behavior to achieve a goal that could prove beneficial to others. what he got out of it: i don't care. a hospital got money that it could really use and whatever laws this senator broke to get that money to those people is okay by me.



[Edited on Mar 22, 2005 5:16PM]

[Edited on Mar 22, 2005 5:17PM]

As Reprobate pointed out, he acted as the agent of a private interest while holding public office while the private interest is trying to curry favor with the foreign power within which the charity operates. How is that okay?

I wouldn't say that using illegal means to gain favor for a massive petrochemical company was doing no harm, nor does that argument refer to some other hypothetical situation.

The same argument, that the ends justified the means, has been the basis for the entire unsupportable war. Hey, if we can't find WMD or any other gussied-up reason, we can say it's for the liberation of the Iraqi people. Such basic dishonesty about motivations is exactly why we're stuck in this mess, and doesn't become any more supportable just because one particular end happens to be good.

Look, if your position was, "I get what's wrong about this but, of all the things he could have done with the money he was carrying around, it could be a lot worse than donating it to a hospital", then ok, he could have used it to buy guns or something.

But the various people above have explained what's going on here, and the fact it went to a hospital (while itself not such a bad thing in the scheme of things) doesn't get away from the total impropriety of the whole business.