Schapelle Corby.... Bogan criminals are not heroes

Bogan criminals are not heroes

Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
February 10,2014

HEAR that cheering — that soundtrack of our shame — as Schapelle Corby is released from a Bali jail? See media outlets wave as much as $3 million at the convicted drug smuggler for her story, to add to the $270,000 her family earned from her autobiography?

See Corby, the heroine of last night’s Channel 9 biopic, whose writer sighs she feels “very much for Schapelle” and “I carry that compassion before being worried about legal things”.

See Labor’s leader, Bill Shorten, shamelessly tell the mob “I don’t know all the ins and outs of what she has done” but he, too, wants “that woman back in Australia as soon as possible” because “that’s what matters to me”?

So I don’t blame Indonesia’s Justice Minister, Amir Syamsuddin, for that curl to his lip when he announced on Friday that he’d granted Corby early parole, not through “generosity” but “the laws of the land”.

You see, he said, “we are a dignified nation”. Unlike ... Australia?

I love this country, but then a Corby opens a jail cell and lets out a fetid blast of our convict culture — that deep, feral resentment of the mob of any check to its licence.

How that mob has trashed our reputation in the name of “our” Schapelle, the big-eyed formerbar hostess at the mercy of those brown foreigners.

Yet the case against Corby was damning from the moment 10 years ago that customs officials in Bali opened the bag carrying her boogie board and found 4.1kg of high-quality marijuana. (“No!” she’d gasped, reaching out to stop them.)

Already one of Corby’s half-brothers — among her mother’s six children by three men — had been convicted of drug possession and jailed for other crimes.

Later the half-brother travelling with her was also jailed over a drug-related home invasion, and last year fined for possessing cocaine. Even her father had a minor conviction for possessing marijuana.

No, a woman isn’t guilty just because her brothers are rotten. But Indonesia had arrested a representative of Australia’s bogan culture, and her tribe reacted in fury at their impertinence.

Newspapers attacked Indonesia’s courts as corrupt and their jails as temples of “gloating sadism” where there was “little sympathy for foreigners, for which you may perhaps read Christians”.

Radio hosts insisted then prime minister John Howard make Indonesia’s president fix the court decision, and one even raged the judges were “straight out of the trees”.

Indonesian diplomats here were sent death threats, white powder in the mail and two bullets with a warning: “Go home you animals”.

The Salvation Army, out collecting for its Red Shield Appeal, even had to promise not to send Indonesia any of the donations, while actor Russell Crowe warned Indonesia to remember we gave money for its tsunami victims, as if we’d only given so our drug smugglers could walk free.

Crowe also demanded Howard “deal with it”, asking: “What if it was your daughter?”

Speak for your own family, Russell. Howard’s, like mine, would never dream of smuggling a sack of weed. This isn’t “our” Schapelle.

If only this sanctification of the bogan criminal stopped with Corby. But we made a national hero of a thieving murderer called Kelly, and we’ve only got worse.

Killer Mark “Chopper” Read had leading journalists make him so famous with books of his alleged exploits that a movie was made of his life.

The natural moral order was inverted so completely that Read, a killer of four men, was used as a spokesman in TV commercials against domestic violence.

Then came the Underbelly books and television series that made cheap crooks and their molls household names, dusting even the dead ones with the bright dust of fast money and faster women that so impresses losers and fools.

The notoriety proved useful for underworld figure Mick Gatto, whose work includes persuading people in the construction industry to do what they’d much rather not, or else ... seen Underbelly?

And how often was this convicted criminal presented as a role model? A giver of charity?

Even the state-funded Melbourne University Press pitched in, idiotically commissioning Gatto to write his autobiography, and telling a restaurant full of men with black shirts and gold teeth how “proud and delighted” it was to launch these whitewashing memoirs.

How much has all this corrupted us? Is this why bikie gangs burst with recruits? Why police report a lack of respect for their authority?

And now Corby is coming out of her cell. What feral spirit is freed with her?

Finally somebody asks Why do we idolise scumbags and sociopaths like Ned Kelly?

Thank God at Last somebody asks the obvious. Apologies to the "Beautiful People"
Cheers to Justin Owen.

No heroics
Why do we idolise scumbags and sociopaths like Ned Kelly?
Justin Owen
Spectator 
9 February 2013

No heroics

Why do we idolise scumbags and sociopaths like Ned Kelly?
Justin Owen 
9 February 2013

Who would have thought that wearing a tin piss-pot on your head and murdering police officers was a passport to greatness? Only, it seems, in Australia. January might be a relatively quiet month in the media, with the main stories traditionally being bushfires, floods and the inevitable Fairfax Australia Day efforts to rename the event Invasion Day, replace our national flag with a Ken Done tea towel and suggest anyone hosting a backyard Oz Day BBQ and grasping a cold beer is fanning the flames of xenophobia.

Last month, however, we saw a twee little event that goaded the summertime slumbering media into action. An orgy of mawkish sentimentality, misplaced national pride and straight up, old-fashioned village idiocy unfolded as the executed mass murderer Ned Kelly was buried for the second time. The interment 2.0 of this evocatively named ‘bushranger’ — never a murderer or a criminal — was apparently as significant a moment in Australian history as VJ Day, the arrival of Arthur Phillip and the end of the 6 o’clock swill. With a gaggle of Kelly distant relatives, fans and apologists singing his praises and hogging the cameras like a drunken uncle at a wedding, any visitor to our shores would reasonably expect Ned to swiftly follow Mary MacKillop to beatification, our new $20 bill and his name emblazoned across the next new seat in the House of Representatives.

In some ways the undeserved attention paid to Kelly’s bones is to be expected. The education so many Australians received over the past century was marred by an inexplicable whitewashing of the crimes of the sociopath Kelly and his gang. When I was an innocent eight-year-old, my local Catholic primary school played its part with a celebration of his life on 11 November 1980, 100 years precisely since Kelly went to the gallows for putting seven bullets, including one into the eyeball, of the dying Constable Lonigan. We were told, with a note of glee, that the hanging judge Lord Justice Barry collapsed and died just a fortnight afterwards — surely divine retribution for such perfidious betrayal of his Irish ancestry. Cardboard Kelly helmet-wearing kids were told Kelly was a figure of brave nobility who proudly went to his death as a veritable martyr for us, the oppressed Catholic working class. We were also gloomily informed the day incidentally marked five years since the dismissal of the Whitlam government: an event undoubtedly caused by the very same evil Anglo-Australian rah-rah Establishment.

Despite such a fulfilling education, it is difficult to ponder how any thinking Australian could celebrate the life and times of Ned Kelly. His Soviet war memorial-sized criminal record includes multiple murders of both police and citizens, numerous assaults, assorted violent robberies, numerous bashings. He and his gang stole from the bodies of murdered police. He even cruelly sent the childless wife of one enemy a box containing calves’ testicles and a note with some disgusting advice on what to do with them. What a guy! He attempted to commit a veritable act of terrorism and potential mass murder by derailing the trains carrying police to Glenrowan.

By every measure, the bloke was a scumbag and a sociopath. He had an Anthony Mundine or perhaps even a Queensland State of Origin-level persecution complex. It’s all the fault of the British, the Establishment, the cops, and so on. They made me do it. Legitimate excuse enough for the average social commentator with a BA or tenured, bearded academic from a former College of Advanced Education.

Thankfully, the judiciary of the 1880s took a much more straightforward view of such paranoid gibbering. It is unfortunate our national myth-makers could not do the same. It was deplorable that in January the Catholic church in Wangaratta saw fit to open its doors for a service celebrating Kelly’s contribution to society.

It is doubtful that same church ever saw fit to honour Sergeant Michael Kennedy and Constables Thomas Lonigan and Michael Scanlan with a Requiem Mass: real heroes, brave men with young families, murdered by the Kelly gang while defending the honest and peaceable citizens of the Colony of Victoria.

The honouring of such a criminal highlights a broader faultline in Australia’s view of what represents heroism and what we hold up as the personal attributes and characteristics to which we should aspire.

Criminality is celebrated every time the telly is turned on. The glamorisation of some of the most objectionable, violent and deranged criminals and killers in our history by the Nine Network through the Underbelly series marks a particular low even for the shiny-arsed bottom-dwellers of commercial TV. Sure, some of the ludicrous scripts and storylines give every appearance of being hastily banged together by a chimpanzee. But under the soft lens of the Underbelly writers, these criminals and their toadies are held out to the viewer as beautiful, powerful, articulate, wealthy, charismatic and one step away from a regular back-slapping spot with Kochie on Sunrise.

Take the recent Underbelly: Razor series. Photos of Sydney’s major Depression-era criminals shows they had faces like dropped pies and heads more suited to racing in the fifth at Randwick than gracing the cover of a glossy magazine. Yet any TimTam-munching viewer at home on a Sunday night would have thought all the good-looking people in Sydney in 1930 chose to live (with their hair dryers and fake tan) among the filth, squalour and slums of Darlinghurst. The slums’ lack of electric lighting was not, as we would have assumed, the result of economic deprivation. Rather the locals were able to bathe in the glow of the perfectly white teeth of these telegenic Underbelly crooks and spivs. Viewers of this sort of show are led to believe the star wasn’t really a deranged, sadistic killer with a massive pair of ears, a cleft palate, a club foot and a steel bolt in his neck. He was a kindly charity worker whose good looks and chiselled chin would put him in a boy band today. Give us a break.

For too long the rotten, the corrupt and the plain evil like Ned Kelly have been held up as national icons through ignorant arguments that they represent healthy Australian anti-authoritarianism and egalitarianism. Australia, it needs to be remembered, only narrowly escaped ‘Waltzing Matilda’ — a song celebrating a vagrant and a sheep thief — as our national anthem. Australia has enough genuine heroes (such as the late Sergeant Kennedy) and achievers across all walks of life we can rightly honour. Ned Kelly and his criminal ilk do not need to be remembered. They don’t need to be romanticised. And they certainly don’t deserve to be celebrated.

Justin Owen is a Sydney lawyer.