I Stand For Mercy

Like so many of you who stand for mercy, I vehemently oppose the legal execution of my fellow Australians, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.

While I do not excuse the seriousness of their crimes, or diminish the potential impact their actions had on the wider community, I cannot in any good conscience disregard the value of human life in order to justify state sanctioned murder. 


The primary objective of modern day capital punishment is to act as a deterrent, however in places like Indonesia where drug smuggling has long been punishable by death, the rate of trafficking has not ceased or diminished.   


Capital punishment is an archaic and barbaric practice, deeply rooted in the ethos of retribution and revenge and in any modern, civil society, there is simply no good argument that can hold up in its favour. 

We know now from DNA testing that an incomprehensible number of innocent people, (predominately African Americans) have been wrongly executed in places like Texas. If capital punishment was still practiced in Australia then an infinite number of Indigenous people would have been executed and Lindy Chamberlain would not be alive today. 

In 2005, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were sentenced to death in Indonesia for attempting to smuggle heroin from Bali into Australia, as part of a group dubbed The Bali Nine. Both Chan and Sukumaran were infamously singled out as the ringleaders of the group by the mainstream Australian media; a title which ultimately helped secure the death penalty sentence. 

Although the real king pins behind the Bali Nine smuggling operation have never actually been caught, both Chan and Sukumaran have spent ten torturous years languishing in a Balinese prison. And yet even in these impossibly dark and hopeless circumstances, the men have managed to find hope and enough light to turn their lives around and show clear signs of remorse and rehabilitation. 




Chan has turned to prayer and counselling, showing remarkable acts of compassion for fellow prisoners, while Sukumaran has found solace and confidence in portraiture and art. Both men are not the same people they were a decade ago and yet all efforts to learn and grow from their mistakes have been entirely disregarded. 

Despite the legal appeals for clemency and the growing pleas for mercy, it appears unlikely that the two Australians will be granted a final reprieve. And while talks are continuing between Canberra and Jakarta, the new Indonesian President, Joko Widodo has made it virtually impossible for the Australian Government to negotiate a pardon. 

Ironically, clemency was actually granted for Chan and Sukumaran under the previous Indonesian Government when the two men were informally granted the right to serve out their sentences on death row. However, in a cruel twist of fate, the new Indonesian President has cracked down on all prisoners convicted of drug offences, stating that there will be no pardon given to those currently serving sentences on death row. 

If anything, the new Indonesian Government should be marketing its ability to rehabilitate death row prisoners such as Chan and Sukumaran; an achievement rarely seen in other prisons around the world. 

Both men are now in a prime position to educate Juvenile offenders caught up in the Indonesian drug scene, and potentially prevent them from making similar mistakes. Rehabilitated prisoners like Chan and Sukumaran form a very real and proactive model with which to fight the war on drugs, and yet instead of harnessing their potential, the government is finalising plans to fire bullets into their hearts. 

In an attempt to sway President Joko Widodo, foreign Minister, Julie Bishop has warned that Australians may be forced to boycott Indonesia if the executions of Chan and Sukumaran go ahead.



 "I think the Australian people will demonstrate their deep disapproval of this action, including by making decisions about where they wish to holiday," she said.




While I can understand Julie Bishop's desire to enlist Australians against the Indonesian Government, I don't think it is wise to discourage Australians from travelling to Indonesia, particularly when the vast majority of Australians tend to migrate to Bali. 



Statements such as these will not alter the decisions made by officials in Jakarta, but they do have the potential to threaten Bali's tourism industry and in turn disrupt the livelihood of many Balinese. 

The 2002 Bali bombing had many ramifications for the tourism industry in Indonesia but for Bali, the attack ripped the heart out of the island’s tourism industry. In 2002, over 40% of the Balinese working population was employed directly or indirectly by the tourism industry.  

In the aftermath of the Bali bombing, international tourism arrival to Bali plummeted and it took well over a year for tourism to show signs of recovery. To boycott travel to Bali in an attempt to punish the Indonesian Government will only backfire in the faces of the gentle Balinese people who are incidentally opposed to capital punishment. 

Although the general population of Indonesia is predominately Muslim, over 90% of Balinese people identify as Hindu. And while there is no official Hindu line on capital punishment, Hinduism opposes killing, violence and revenge, and most Hindu people oppose capital punishment. 




In an interview that aired on Four Corners last week on the case of Chan and Sukumaran, Balinese people were asked what they thought about the case. Every single person was opposed to the executions and some said they were afraid that if this went ahead, the number of Australians coming to Bali would decrease. 

I spent time in Bali just days before the Bali Bombings and again a few years later, and the main thing that had changed was a newfound sense of fear that their lives could be upended by another event that stopped people from visiting the island. 




If the Australian Government is serious about putting pressure on Indonesia to stop the executions then they should not be doing so at a cost to the Balinese people. There are other ways to affect change and they might start by examining why the Australian Federal Police appeared on Four Corners last week stating that they would not do anything differently if the same situation presented itself again. 




The AFP acted following a tip off by the father of Scott Rush, one of the younger Bali Nine members. Mr. Rush phoned the AFP to warn them that his son was about to do something stupid, but he made that call in a desperate attempt to protect his son from being caught trafficking drugs through Indonesia. 




However, instead of intervening to protect the boy from being arrested in a country that executes drug traffickers, the AFP alerted the Indonesian authorities about their suspicions. Instead of waiting to arrest the group once they had landed in Australia, the AFP effectively handed the group over to the Indonesian authorities. 




Since then, the Australian Government has had ten years to put pressure on the Indonesian Government to pardon Chan and Sukumaran. Why they waited until the final hour is beyond me. 

I can only assume that they were acting on the good faith of the previous Indonesian President, on an assurance that the men would live out their sentences in prison. If the new president does indeed ignore the Australian Government pleas for clemency then it is up to the Australian Government to respond in a manner that hurts the Indonesian Government, and not the people. 




Nothing good can come from this nightmare, not for the families of Chan and Sukumaran or for Indonesia.  Killing these two men will not dent the war on drugs, and the drug deaths and overdoses will continue to plague the country until they begin to rethink their entire approach to drug reform. 




Addiction is treated as a criminal issue and so we have prisons overflowing with addicts who were arrested in the throws of their disease. In actual fact, addiction is a health issue and one that warrants a radically new approach, not just in Indonesia but also in Australia and the US and the UK and in all countries where the war on drugs is failing. 




Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran are not bad people. They are not cruel, evil, violent men who cannot feel remorse or be rehabilitated. They made a mistake, a costly mistake at a time when they were young, stupid, bulletproof, but they have been paying for that mistake for the last 10 years. They could so easily be my son; your son, friend, nephew or brother and they do not deserve to pay for their mistake with their lives. 

How a mentally ill man was able to bring Sydney to a grinding halt.

Like so many Australians, I watched in horror and disbelief as the siege in Sydney's Martin Place unfolded on Monday morning. At around 10am, we were told that a gunman had stormed the Lindt Cafe in Sydney's CBD taking between 15 and 50 hostages. Within an hour, Sydney was in a state of emergency lockdown. People on the floors above the cafe were escorted down ladders to safety, and the channel 7 offices, directly across the road from the Lindt cafe, were emptied of staff. Elsewhere in the CBD, people were forced to remain indoors and the Opera House was immediately closed and evacuated. Emergency services, special forces units and the bomb squad were mobilised around the perimeter of the cafe, and hostage negotiators were put in place. 

The highly sophisticated security measures were praised for providing safety and reassurance to a frightened and bewildered public, but they also fed into the false and misleading narrative that Sydney was under attack. 

Little was known about the gunman or his motive until much later that day, however to some news sources, the mere presence of a black flag with white Islamic writing was ample confirmation of an ISIS terrorist attack. Rupert Murdoch's 'Daily Telegraph' reported the siege as an attack by the IS Death Cult in its 2pm edition, despite failing to validate this information. Throughout the 16 hour siege, interviews with terrorism experts were screened on the ABC, SBS and all commercial stations. Analysts likened the siege to the London, Madrid and Boston terrorist attacks, even long after the police had ruled out links between the gunman and terrorist networks.  

By mid afternoon, the gunman was publicly identified as Man Harin Monis, a lone wolf previously known to police for his incredibly checkered criminal past, including the suspected brutal murder of his ex- wife, and 40 charges of sexual assault. The media were also quick to inform us that Monis was also an Iranian Refugee in receipt of Centrelink benefits; a self- appointed Islamic Cleric; a self-styled Islamic Sheikh and an Islamic extremist. 

The fact that Monis had a long history of violence against women was nowhere near as compelling as his history with religious extremism, especially when the latter could be positioned to justify a terrorist agenda.  The letters Monis sent to the families of slain Australian soldiers were undoubtedly reprehensible but so too was the brutal murder of his ex-wife and the string of sexual assaults against women. However, these crimes failed to rate a mention in the Prime Minister's press briefing, presumably because they didn't fit the convenient terrorist profile. 

"What we do know is that the perpetrator was well known to State and Commonwealth authorities. He had a long history of violent crime, infatuation with extremism and mental instability. We know that he sent offensive letters to the families of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan and was found guilty of offences related to this. We also know that he posted graphic extremist material online. As the siege unfolded yesterday, he sought to cloak his actions with the symbolism of the ISIL death cult." Tony Abbott. 

Tony Abbott's decision to use words such as, 'ISIL', 'death cult', 'terror' and 'extremism'  in his subsequent press briefings was certainly not accidental. Abbott later described the siege as a 'brush with terrorism' despite knowing that Monis was a mentally deranged individual acting alone. And in the aftermath of the siege on Tuesday when the facts were well established, the Prime Minister repeatedly lamented the fact that Monis was not on any of the terror watch lists. This statement seemed dubious to me until I realised that the terrorist narrative was playing right into the government's hands in terms of its asylum seeker policy, anti terror laws and its views on meta data retention. Any future decisions or changes to legislation could be justified under the pretence that Man Haron Monis the terrorist / refugee had slipped through the cracks of a broken system. 

And it didn't end there. In the wake of the Martin Place siege, the NSW police commissioner reactivated Operation Hammerhead, which saw an increased police presence on Sydney's streets despite the fact that Man Haron Monis was dead and city was no more or less dangerous than it was on the day prior to the tragedy. One officer described the fear on people's faces as he walked around the CBD, saying 'the public are visibly scared and you can see it in their eyes'. Conceivably, the increased police presence would be the very thing driving up public fear, however real or imagined the threat may be.  

There is no denying that this despicable event had a sobering effect on the people of Sydney and the wider Australian community. This has been observed in the outpouring of grief and support for the hostages and their families and in the impressive array of floral tributes that continue to grow in Martin Place. However, perhaps the most positive thing to emerge from the tragedy is the #illridewithyou campaign. The campaign sprung to life after a female Sydney commuter offered to ride with a Muslim woman on the train after she was seen removing her Hijab in fear of a racist retaliation. The gesture resulted with the hashtag trending worldwide and it was still trending three days later. 

That the tragedy appears to have galvanised the wider community to unite against acts of racism, at least on public transport, is a good thing.  However, #illridewithyou is speaking to a very specific kind of racism; the same kind of Islamophobia that is drummed up and pushed along by people like Tony Abbott and Rupert Murdoch, along with other factions of the media in any given news cycle. Seeking to paint Monis as a terrorist may have backfired in the faces of those who were invested in its success, but we must ask ourselves why the Mulsim / Terrorist narrative was eager to gain so much traction in the first place. 

The fact is, Monis' is dead and we will never know why he did what he did. But from everything we do know, it seems unlikely that his actions were driven by political or religious motivation, but rather by his own personal grievances with the system. We know that he had grievances with the courts over his conviction for writing letters and he had very recently taken those grievances all the way to the high court where his case was subsequently thrown out. Following his High Court appearance, there was no further legal recourse for Monis to have those grievances heard. Monis also had grievances over the way he was treated (he says tortured) in prison and he had taken to the streets in the past to air those grievances to the media. Given that one of his requests was to speak to Tony Abbott, it's highly possible that he used the siege as an attempt to air those grievances to the Prime Minister. 

No matter which way you look at it, this was clearly a deeply disturbed individual, who orchestrated a particularly evil act and he should not have been allowed on the streets, let alone permitted to hold a gun license. However, that more weight has been given to his religious affiliation than his mental instability or his crimes against women, speaks volumes. 

The fact that Monis asked for an ISIS flag should have held no more weight than if he had asked for a Christmas tree or a purple people eater. He was a sick man who used the fiercely threatening symbolism of ISIS to make his deranged demands seem more threatening. He knew that he would be taken more seriously with the flag than without it, and the sad thing is he was right. An entire city took this madman very seriously and we need to ask ourselves why.

If the flag in the cafe window did not contain Islamic text then it's safe to say that the siege would have been reported as a hostage situation and not a terrorist attack. Only a few days earlier a man took two people hostage in a house in Brunswick, Melbourne and the only words used to describe him were ' a man'. When Anders Brevick blew up government buildings in Norway, killing 8 people before shooting dead 69 more, he was labelled a paranoid schizophrenic. Though he was later convicted of mass murder and terrorism, the Christian people in Norway did not fear a racist / cultural backlash because of his right-wing militant ideology. The fact that Brevick was a Christian extremist meant that his religious affiliation did not receive anywhere near the same media traction that Monis' has achieved. 

Yet how many editorials have we read in the past few days about Man Harin Monis with the word 'terrorism' in the title? Too many to count. The truth is we were so quick to paint Monis as a terrorist that the facts became incidental, beside the point. The terrorist narrative took off at a speed that made it unstoppable even once it had been established that this was not a home grown terrorist, but rather a mentally unstable, middle-aged man.  I would never defend any act of violence, political or otherwise, and what Monis did was heinous and despicable. But we need to ask ourselves why the extremist / fundamentalist narrative was so quick to bolt from the gate and we ought to be bloody skeptical the next time we sense it being tailored to fit down our throats.  

Seven Years On...

5.30am: 7/7/14

Today is the seventh day of December and the seventh anniversary of your death. It's 5.30am and exactly one and a half hours before the phone rang that morning and I heard your mother tell me you were gone. Every anniversary since then, I have woken up before 7am, as if my subconscious clock is trying to beat time at its own game and stop that moment from occurring.

For me, 7am marks the beginning of the horror but I could not have known then that you had left this world hours before, at some point during the night, and your mother was just waiting until a reasonable hour to call. I did not find that out until much later.

In this moment seven years ago, I was still fast asleep and dreaming of you, still totally oblivious to what was waiting for me when I opened my eyes. I was dreaming vividly about our wedding day, no doubt because of the plans we had been making the day before, and I physically felt you slide the wedding ring onto my hand.  When the phone rang and vibrated across my bedside table at such an early hour, I just assumed it was you and I answered it with a wry high smile on my face, still floating down from the blissful dream but eager to give you a hard time for pulling me out of it. "Hey baby".... I heard myself say, "I was just having the most amazing dream and I felt you place"... but then a woman's voice cut me off.

A few days later I wondered if maybe, just maybe, in those strange hours between darkness and dawn, not long after your soul had left your body, you did actually slip that ring on my finger.  I wish I could remember that feeling and hold onto that dream but all I have is the end of the dream and the beginning of the nightmare, the moment of intersection, the collision between two completely opposing worlds: before and after.

For a long time it all felt like a bad dream and I struggled to find my place in the brave new world. I had to learn how to be human again, to feign normality again, to do everything people expected of me; to smile and laugh, to talk and relate, to be present with friends and family. But I barely recognised myself in the mirror and it took a long time to get used to this new person parading as me. My only real comfort came from the darkness as it gave me a sense of respite from the exhausting daily ritual of trying to appear "normal", to pretend that I was "improving", and to assure others that I was going to be "ok".

In truth, I did not know if I would ever be ok. I was not coping and I broke down and wept every time I was alone; in the privacy of my car, in public toilets, behind sunglasses, in car parks and in alleys. It felt like there was literally no escape from the relentless reminder that you were never coming back. This was real and I couldn't find anywhere big enough to hide or anywhere far away enough to outrun it. Trying to make people feel better about my grief became an additional struggle, a thankless task that soon became exhausting.  I started to hide away from the world and decline invitations to dinners, parties and coffee to the point where people just stopped asking. I was grateful for that because it meant I no longer had to lie or make up excuses.

I started to sleep for long periods and as often as I could, whenever I had the chance. Sleep was the only place I could go for relief. But I could never truly forget...My dreams were always haunted by the the image of his face, his eyes, his hands, in various distortions. I started having a recurring dream that lasted for five years where I would catch a glimpse of him on a train or around a corner and I would chase him for miles but never catch up to him as he was always one step ahead. I started to tell myself that he was still alive, that he just didn't want to be with me anymore and somehow that scenario seemed more palpable. Then the dream changed its shape and it was always the same phone call in which he would casually tell me that he was alive and he had just forgotten to call me for the last few years. The unconscious mind trying to carry out wish fulfilment I suppose.

Some people say that seven years is a long time to mourn somebody and I suppose that may be true, except Chance Hall was not just somebody to me. He was the love of my life, the soul for my soul, and the only person with whom I have ever felt truly myself. Being with him felt like going home, like finding the missing pieces of yourself so that you finally feel whole, at peace and utterly complete. I was so deeply in love with him in a way that I have never loved anyone else and he was equally and as deeply in love with me. To suddenly wake up and learn that I would never see him, never smell him or touch him again - nothing can prepare a person for that. I am not the same person that I was before he died and when I look back at old photographs of me I can barely recognise that girl with the smug little smirk and the stars in her eyes. A person cannot live through this kind of loss and come through intact. The shock alone changes a persons DNA.

My maternal grandmother was widowed at age 36 (just three years older than me) and she wore black for the next 20 years. As a kid I never understood why she didn't remarry but now I understand completely and  I can respect that. The man she loved was gone and there was no other soul for her soul.  Just like my grandmother, my other half was taken from me and it's taken me seven years to fully accept that. But even though I accept it now, that doesn't mean I want to be with somebody, anybody just for the sake of being with somebody, anybody. I just wish people would accept that about me. I am perfectly content with my decision.

People say time heals all wounds and I used to think those people were assholes but I don't really think that anymore. What I do think is that time just takes you further and further away from the raw and brutal moment of truth so that you gradually become more immune to the pain. Human beings can get used to anything and so I guess that is what has happened with me. That is what I think they mean by acceptance - in time you learn to accept the pain as another part of your narrative, it becomes part of your DNA.

Losing Chance has clearly become part of my narrative, but it does not define who I am. Loving him and being loved by him is equally a part of my story and I am comforted by the time we spent together.  For a long time I was willing to trade off the relationship if it meant I could erase the marks that his death had left upon me. Now I wouldn't dream of giving up a single moment of time with that precious man. Our love story may have been fleeting and I was cheated out of my happy ending, but I was lucky enough to know love in all of its glory; in its unbridled joy and its equally magnanimous heartache. At the end of the day, when all the dust has settled, I found my one true love and I am no longer searching for anyone. Nothing is ever truly lost, especially not love and that is what I choose to remember most on this day. RIP Chance Hall. I will love you forever.