Most people will not miss Mark 'Chopper' Read, because of his reckless attitude to human life and law and order. The 58-year-old standover man died from liver cancer last month. In his last interview, screened last night on60 Minutes, he boasted about killing four people, speaking in a manner reminiscent of the subjects of the current film about the 1960s Indonesian genocideThe Act of Killing.
Read's pride in his criminal exploits, and indeed Channel 9's giving him a platform to boast about them, stands at odds with much of what we value in a civil society. It is hard to conceive of him as anything other than a seriously negative contributor to the community. Yet at master of his own destiny, he had an ability to maintain his dignity, and in that sense it is possible to argue that he was — like Ned Kelly — a partially positive role model for today's prisoners, and indeed all human beings whose behaviour makes them an outcast and an object of scorn.
The majority of prison inmates have come to crime through circumstances not of their own making, such as mental illness or a disadvantaged upbringing. They are further crushed by the system and objectified as 'monsters' by the media and public, even though in fact they are 'people like us'. Joe Caddy writeselsewhere in Eureka Street that labelling people as criminals denies that we have a good deal in common with them as fellow human beings.
It is good that Read overcame this 'other-ness' but regrettable that he remained unrepentant and thoroughly evil in character. He was able to win a kind of public respect that is routinely denied to prisoners who are contrite but lack Read's celebrity.
There are various ways of dehumanising people, and it is always wrong to do so, no matter what the circumstances are. Immigration Minister Scott Morrison is doing this with his instruction that departmental and detention centre staff must publicly refer to asylum seekers as 'illegal' arrivals and as 'detainees', and not as clients.
Asylum seeker advocates work tirelessly to restore the dignity that these people have lost through being outcast in this way. The asylum seekers are being made faceless through government policy.
The creator of the sievx.com website Marg Hutton attempts to reverse this objectification of asylum seekers with her publication of names of some of those who perished in the SIEVX tragedy in 2001. 'Ghazi Alghizzy — wife Fatima Jabbar Alidawi and four children, Mohammed (age ten), Hussein (age seven), Zahraa (age eight) and Alyaa (age four) all drowned.' Her meticulous research has yielded names for many of the ''illegals, and this brings home the humanity we share with these people. Like us, they all have their own stories.
There is also the example of one asylum seeker who has been able to resist this objectification. Hazara refugee Barat Ali Batoor is a photojournalist, and his image of a group of asylum seekers emerging from a makeshift gap in the deck of a timber boat bound for Australia was last week named Photo of the Year in the 2013 Nikon-Walkley Awards for Excellence in Photojournalism. His story is in The Global Mail, which published the award winning photograph.
Batoor is no longer an unnamed asylum seeker. He is an inspiration, in that he was able to rise above his circumstances, and in that sense he has won public respect like Chopper Read. Some would say that he simply jumped a few queues in order to be accepted as a refugee by UNHCR and gain resettlement in Australia, but it's also true that allowing human beings like him to master their own destiny will bring out the best in them and us.