Reading some post about my boy BBO, and a recent incident in his home town of Innisfail, which is just down the road from Cairns, so I thought I'd share as it is pretty fucked up!!!
Some light has been shed on what happened since, so I will tell the story as it stands now.
Over the past weekend an older man who was suffering sever pain in his foot, and without doubt some serious mental demons, decided he wanted to have his leg amputated below the knee. So he manged to find this desperate farm worker from Vanuatu (more on this after) who must have been working on one of the banana farms, and offered him $5K to chop it off with a circular saw. The guy from Vanuatu agreed, and proceeded to cut his leg off, below the knee, with said circular saw. He clearly didn't think this through, and after the guy from Vanuatu bailed with a fist full of pineapples, ol mate bled out in front of a fish and chip shop, and later died. How fucked up right!!!
I was chatting to a mate last night, and he explained the plight of people from Vanuatu working here in Australia. In a nut shell, its modern day legal slavery. They sign a document stating they will work for a farmer, and agree to having their pay docked in any way decided by their employer. So basically, the farmer can charge him say, $500 per week for driving him to the farm every day, or any other absurd reason they can come up with. So the poor man who has agreed to the terms out of sheer desperation is completely fucked over, and ends up basically working for free.
I dont know the ins and outs of how this scheme works, but its apparently completely legal somehow. My mate learned about it in a bunch of pod casts he listened to.