"The quality of mercy is not strained. It is twice blessed:

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It blesseth him that gives and him that takes."

- Portia in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, begging Shylock not to insist on his legal right to have Antonio butchered to death.

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Whenever I hear a toadying Australian prime minister gush the old lie that Australians and Americans have such "shared values", I scoff a heartfelt "Rubbish!"

Then, just getting started on how very unalike Australians and Americans are (and on how wrong it is for mild-mannered us to always dutifully join in belligerent Americans' wars and invasions) I invoke the lie-detecting example of the gulf between our two peoples in the matter of the death penalty.

Barbarous, backward Americans' fondness for executions is very newsworthy at the moment. There has been Tennessee's cruel and unusual attempt to despatch Christa Pike. Then there is the looming December 3 execution of Nidal Malik Hasan (once scheduled by Pete Hegseth for live streaming!) in a hail of righteous bullets.

Relatively merciful Australia's last execution, the hanging of Ronald Ryan at the behest of the merciless Victorian premier Henry Bolte, was in 1967. Meanwhile in the comparatively merciless USA there continue to be executions galore, especially in the especially backward and merciless states of Texas and Florida.

To be fair to the US, all evidence shows that it is slowly dispensing with executions. Perhaps one day in the distant future, when and if it morally matures, the US will become more admirably Australian. Till then an Australian prime minister, toadying more precisely, might talk of "the shared values of all Australians and of the better Americans".

Australia's last execution, in 1967, will probably be literally Australia's last execution, ever, thanks to the very Australian (and utterly unAmerican) Crimes Legislation Amendment - Torture Prohibition and Death........

© Canberra Times