When I used to live in Singapore I’d come back home to Sydney to visit and would meet new people who would say, ‘oh you live in Singapore I love Singapore’, and I’d say yeah it’s clean and everything but do you know they hang young Singaporeans in Changi prison every weekend?

People never really believed me or politely moved on to other more appropriate dinner conversation, but now that an Aussie is about to end his days depressingly far from home under a law few people here agree with and most are strongly opposed to, this is the only dinner conversation I am hearing at the moment.

In the end I left Singpore for many reasons, but one of them was definitely the silent oppression you feel in that island city-state expressed through the government owned media and a kind of affluent apathy. The prevailing attitude is if we keep everyone rich no-one is going to question the government.

We used to go to bars and clubs which had signs out the front which said “Ecstacy means 30 years prison” and if you think they don’t mean it you can often find evidence of it at the back of the Straits Times where a small line entry about someone being incarcerated for life or hanged, acts as a cautionary tale for anyone who strays off the correct path of prosperity and sameness.

There were even rumours which went if you were found with a small amount of narcotic in Singapore, say enough for a decent night out in Sydney, and you were a foreigner, you were taken to Changi airport put on a plane home and told to never come back to Singapore again – but if you were a local you would be locked up for a very long time.

While there are severe penalties for speaking out against the Singapore Government, an occasional brave soul who wasn’t prepared to accept the rules would speak out against laws that meant kids experimenting with drugs and alcohol in the way young people do all over the world, could find themselves locked up for a very long time. You would usually read about it in a publication not based in Singapore, because the Straits Times doesn’t report on dissidents.

I met a lot of wonderful people in Singapore but it was a place I knew I would never live long term, I missed the freedoms of Australia too much. You begin to feel a little unreal after a while in Singapore, it’s partly the relentless monotone of the equatorial heat but it’s also the equally unrelenting persistence of an iron fisted regime in a silk glove.

I am sure most of you watched with the same frustration I did as Nguyen Tuong Van’s mum left to go and spend a few days with him before his impending execution. There is nothing right about this, no matter how much noise the hysterical right wing anti-drug lobby makes. The death penalty is the last refuge of a barbarian society that has given up on law and order. Thankfully we live in a civilized society.