Those of you who are from Sydney or are even avid news readers from all over the world may have heard of a story to emerge from Sydney’s  south west on Friday night. There was a Christmas party held at a function centre in Fairfield, one of the more ‘cultural’ centres of Sydney. It was a Christmas function that was attended by a large number of the areas Asian community. As sometimes happens with these things not everyone there got along with everyone else, a fight ensued, machetes were used and some genius decided to pull out a gun and a 19 year old Asian man was shot in the chest and he was pronounced dead before they could get him to hospital.

Now many obvious questions emerge from this kind of situation. Firstly can you not think of a better time than a Christmas party to sort out your problems with other members of the community, secondly, when did talking become useless and we felt we needed to kill people that we disagreed with and thirdly, what kind of people bring machetes and hand guns to a Christmas party. It would seem only people who are looking for trouble and in this instance it appears that they certainly found it.

Now whilst it is clear that the 19 year old man who lost his life is a tragic victim from this event there are other victims that nobody takes the time to think about or even realise exists. I was scheduled to go to a wedding on Saturday night, the night after this shooting. My girlfriend is Korean and because of this a lot of her friends are Asian and so we go to a lot of functions in the Asian parts of Sydney. The wedding that we were supposed to go to on Saturday night was actually due to be held in the exact same function centre where this machete and hand gun fuelled fight took place.

There are few things more important in a girl’s life than her wedding day. Most girls only get one of them (I am sure that will be the case with this girl) and you could only imagine what it would have been like waking up on the morning of your wedding about to get ready for what should be the happiest day of your life only to find out that the venue that you had chosen for this occasion was now roped off by police who had turned your wedding venue into a crime scene to try and work out why a few heroes decided to try and kill each other.

It would be horrible. These are good people, the girl is a hard working accountant and her newlywed husband is a long serving member of the Australian Army. They have never done a thing wrong in their lives and their wedding was ruined by the actions of a few selfish morons. The bride had to spend her entire wedding day calling her 200 guests to tell them that the wedding function was off and that they now would all be meeting at her house for a small get together.

Luckily the night still went well and considering the situation everybody had a good time. I personally was happy with the change as the wedding was now catered by Pizza Hut and KFC instead of by the Vietnamese function centre which was now involved in an intense spate of police questioning. It isn’t that I don’t like Vietnamese food but how many times do you get to eat chicken out of a bucket at a wedding. I was cheering! However somehow despite the brave faces they put on I don’t imagine that the bride and groom were as happy with their guests eating pizza in their backyard as they would have been with their dream wedding.

So my message goes out to those of you out there that think it is a good idea to carry machetes and guns around when you go to Christmas functions. Stop being so selfish and think of other people! I don’t know why you feel like you need to kill someone, I can’t bring myself to yell at somebody let alone shoot them! But if you do need to do it, at least be considerate of others!  Chuck the soon to be victim in the boot of the car, drive him to a secluded out of the way location for his execution that will not harm other members of society. Just because you are an ‘underbelly’ wannabe gangbanger try hard murder it doesn’t mean you have to be selfish and ruin a bride’s perfect evening!