The Nine Network has denied it has an exclusive deal with the family of the 14-year-old boy on trial for marijuana possession in Indonesia.

Sources told The Sun-Herald that a deal, worth between $200,000 and $300,000, was made for rights to the boy's story for 60 Minutes, Nine News, and Nine Entertainment's ACP magazines.

The newspaper reported that Nine's managing director, Jeffrey Browne, finalised the deal and it was signed off by the chief executive, David Gyngell last Thursday.

However, Nine spokesman David Hurley today denied reports of a deal.

"There is categorically no deal," Mr Hurley told theage.com.au.

"You can rely on that," he added.

The release from a Bali prison of the 14-year-old Australian boy convicted of marijuana possession has been met with relief and rejoicing. In the circumstances, the ''Bali Boy'' and his family can consider themselves extremely fortunate. He has avoided the substantial prison sentences delivered to other young Australians convicted of drug crimes in Bali.

Equally, however, he has also avoided the fate of other visitors whose lives have been sacrificed to the allure of Bali's hedonistic fantasy.

Recently, this fantasy claimed another victim. A young Australian celebrating schoolies was electrocuted outside a Bali nightclub. The 18-year-old's death was not simply a tragic accident. It was a symptom of a much deeper malaise in which the island's rapid development as an international tourist destination has far outstripped its capacity to manage public infrastructure, health and safety.

The young man's death was caused by contact with unsheathed wires at the back of a street-level neon sign. Sadly, in a country that has very low per capita income and poor public safety regulation, such ''accidents'' are widespread. And even if the electrocution is investigated, corrupt policing and judicial processes ensure that convictions are rare.

In a way, however, these underdeveloped governance and policing processes are also part of Bali's allure. Many of the annual 2 million international visitors are enticed by the low cost and delirious freedom of drinking, partying, night-clubbing and drug-taking that have become inscribed on the island's tourism culture.

In this context, the ''Bali boy'' was clearly beguiled by the easy access to marijuana and the ways in which adults and the culture more generally appeared to endorse its sale. Working the spaces between legal and illegal hedonism, drug sellers trawl the beaches and nightclubs of Kuta, sometimes working in tandem with corrupt police officers. The Bali boy was clearly seduced by this fantasy of unrestrained pleasure, and by his own adolescent bravado.

Older visitors, of course, have been equally seduced by the lure of cheap hotels, restaurants, clothing stores and condominiums. Seeking their own little tract of paradise, many are settling in the villas that are now teeming across the western coastline.

No longer satisfied with an annual holiday, these older Australians are creating a property boom as developments sprawl across the rich and fertile soils of the island's old food bowl. The ancient rice fields are now covered in white buildings and congested lines of traffic.

However, rather than see the contaminated waterways, collapsing infrastructure, criminal violence and gridlock traffic, the visitors seem satisfied with a massage, cheap cocktails, and a panoramic view of the increasingly polluted surf that fringes the Kuta coastal strip.

Bali's sensual and intoxicating beauty seems to have fortified Australians' sense of privilege in Bali - a belief that the island is like a friendly neighbour in an otherwise alien neighbourhood.

This sense of privilege incited the terror attacks of 2002 and 2005, and seems also to be distracting many tourists from a new phase of criminal violence in Bali. Few Australians seem aware that the nightlife violence that was inflicted on former AFL coach Dean Laidley is becoming increasingly common in Bali.

Assaults occur frequently and are often associated with ethnic tensions, organised crime, drug trading and forms of gang warfare.

At the well-known Sky Garden nightclub, a patron was killed last year when he was thrown from a fifth-floor window by one of the club's security staff. In the same year, Japanese tourism numbers plummeted after two incidents in which Japanese women were stalked, sexually assaulted and murdered.

In response to this sort of violence, many nightclubs have hired security staff from Laskar Bali, one of the most notorious gangs in Bali, a group that has been directly implicated in prostitution rackets, drug trading, inter-gang wars and targeted murders.

It may be that the Bali boy will have learnt an important lesson. He may be contrite and will tell his friends about his brief encounter with Kerobokan prison, where he looked directly into the horror of his folly, and of the deep dangers of wanting too much.

If he had the good fortune to meet Schapelle Corby or Scott Rush, he may also have learnt that the state can easily become a catacomb of treachery and injustice. Like these young Australians, the boy may take the hard lesson that all desires are relative to the power of the state.

On the other hand, it's possible that this young boy will be made a hero by his friends and, much worse, by the Australian media. His ordeal will simply add to the absurdly disproportionate allure and fantasy that has been created around Bali - and around the validity of our own culturally conjured pleasures.

There is no doubt that the boy was entrapped by the combination of these desires, and Indonesia's desperately corrupt judicial and policing systems. In my many visits to Kerobokan prison I've seen the end-point of this convocation: young people who have become entranced by a fantasy of infinite bliss that seems so lusciously close, and yet can produce such devastating effects.

Two of these young people, Myuran Sukamaran and Andrew Chan, are waiting in Kerobokan's miserable death tower. It was from Kerobokan that the 14-year-old was processed for release, the last point of his ordeal.

Or is it? The commercial media in Australia have been in discussions with an agent acting for the family of the child, whose ineluctable fantasy is a shame to us all.

As is the story of Bali itself - beautiful, horrible, and now utterly transformed by our own desires. Let's hope that the boy who has risen momentarily to our attention has learnt at least this much.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/behind-balis-beauty-20111205-1ofb8.html

The Bali drug boy, as the tabloids have labelled him, was met by a slavering media pack when he flew back to Sydney on Monday.

The horde followed him to Lake Macquarie, where hessian sheets had been draped around the family home in the forlorn hope of privacy. Fat chance. Cameras zoomed in everywhere and the hacks set up camp in belligerent mood and waited: Bali boy's family was not playing the media game.

Worse, there were rumours of a six-figure deal for an exclusive story on Channel Nine. Grossly affronted, The Daily Telegraph accused the kid of ''goading the waiting media by whistling, sniggering and gesturing'' and his father of joining the ''shenanigans''.

How pathetic. Have these clowns learnt nothing from the shameful stories emerging from the British inquiry into the media's invasion of personal privacy? Evidently not. The boy is 14 for heaven's sake. When the father finally fronted on Wednesday, his quiet dignity was in stark contrast to the grotesque antics of the media circus.

The assistance of the Australian government had been wonderful, he said. The Indonesians had treated the family with respect. And there had been and would be no media deal. His son was genuinely sorry for the trouble he had caused and now could they please get on with their lives.

Compare this to events on the other side of the country, where another boy went home last week. Ali Roni, a barely literate fisher kid from a remote island in Indonesia, was detained for people smuggling two years ago. He was also 14. He'd been only a kitchen hand on the boat, but he spent most of those two years banged away with adult criminals in Perth's maximum security Hakea prison until a court finally recognised that he was a minor and set him free last month.

But there was no media pack for Ali Roni. Not a news story, really. Except, of course, for his cruel ordeal at the hands of an incompetent Australian justice system and the shame this brings upon us all.

Mike Carlton