Government (Grrrr...)

"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." -Aesop

After my passport experience, I was noticeably frustrated. To put it politely, I was driven to profanity and, eventually, to insanity. However, the document arrived and I was able to move on with my life, free from the shackles of bureaucracy. Or so I thought.

Sadly, I have fallen back into the twisted web that is dealing with government. My laptop, which was sent to the US for repairs, is having difficulties clearing customs. It is not a nefarious device. It most certainly is not contraband. The problem isn't with the computer at all. The problem is that the Australian government, in order to get its cut, wants to know how much the repair was worth, and I can't have it until they know. To compound the problem, the shipping company has a policy of returning, at the expense of the sender, items that can't clear customs within 5 days. Now, I must rely upon the company that made repairs under warranty to slap a value on the repairs and inform myself and the shipping company so that we, in turn, can inform customs. In hindsight, "twisted web" doesn't seem nearly confusing enough to capture all the subtleties of this charlie foxtrot of a process.

Now, the difficulty and the difficulties in understanding the difficulty are bad enough. However, there is always salt for a wound, and governments have a great way of finding it. Some context is needed to understand what I mean.

As I arrived in Australia, a major story in the news concerned a man named Dr Mohammed Haneef. Haneef, it seems, is the second cousin of one of the terrorists who decided to drive a flaming jeep into Glasgow's airport. After the attack, he made a sudden decision to leave Australia. He had a string of conversations with his brother that aroused enough suspicion in Australian authorities that they decided to revoke his work visa. Controversy ensued over the decision, with bleeding hearts siding with Haneef and hawks calling for his head. A judge has recently overturned the decision to revoke Haneef's visa.

Now, propriety of the decision to revoke Haneef's visa aside, consider this whole spectacle from my shoes. Here, a judge has just said that a man who government officials know has links to terrorists is welcome in Australia. (In fairness to Haneef, I must say that links here are familial relations. I do not know if Haneef is a terrorist, if he supports terrorists, or if he is as dodgy his actions have made him seem. I do know that the police consider him suspicious, which leads to my point.) My computer, on the other hand, can't enter the country.

The sheer lunacy of it makes me want to grab a customs official by the collar and scream: "What the hell is wrong with you? My computer can't enter the country without an invoice for repairs, but this guy can correspond with terrorists and just waltz right in? If my computer tries to leave the country suddenly, can I have it? Or does it have to give material support to some radicals before it's allowed?"

Government...