verging_on_random

Some deaths are more equal than others

October 9, 2007 on 10:37 pm | In Uncategorized |

I’m thoroughly bemused by the ‘anger’ of a family who have been offered a gift of ‘only’ $16,000 by the government (link). In my simple moral universe, a gift is something to appreciate and be grateful for, not a reason to snarl that you’re ‘entitled’ to something better.

The gift in question has been offered by the Australian government to the family of Vicki Rigg-McEwen, who was killed in Turkey six years ago. The money is intended to defray the cost of bringing Vicki’s body home. Yet the family isn’t happy:

Mrs Rigg-McEwen, who is preparing to mark Amanda’s birthday on Friday, said the offer came only after a report about the family’s situation appeared in the Herald in August and the Opposition spokesman on foreign affairs, Robert McClelland, made enquiries into the case. “I felt like it was shut-up money … I just feel they have said, We’ll give you this and go away.”

She said the $16,000 would only cover the cost of bringing her daughter’s body home, not the cost of flights to be by her bedside, or that of her funeral.

I haven’t looked for any data but I think it’s a fair bet that of the million or so Australians who are overseas at any given time, a few die every now and then. I wasn’t aware that the Australian government put its hand in my pocket to pay for the cost of flying the bodies home. In fact I venture to suggest that it does no such thing. And if one of those Australian families gets ill or injured, the government doesn’t fork out the cost of an airfare for a relative to fly across the world to be at their bedside. So what makes the Rigg-McEwen family so upset? It seems to me they’re getting a good deal with the $16,000.

Even more puzzling, what’s with this stuff about the government not covering the cost of Vicki’s funeral? Why TF would it even think about doing that? People die suddenly and tragically all the time. The bereaved families don’t head off to the government and suggest that the taxpayer might like to pay for the funeral. Why should it make any difference that the death occurred overseas?

Well the answer is in the cause of death. Vicki was killed in a terrorist attack.

Vicki Rigg-McEwen, whose daughter Amanda Rigg, 22, died in a suicide bombing in Turkey on September 10, 2001, the day before the attacks in the US, said her family had been treated appallingly by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and deserved an apology from the Foreign Affairs Minister.

The idiotic hysteria that Howard’s mob have tried to whip up about the War on Terror has created unanticipated consequences. Suddenly an Australian who gets killed in a terrorist attack is in a different category altogether to an Australian who gets killed in a road accident or contracts a fatal illness or gets mugged by a homicidal lunatic. The families of all these ordinary people can make their own arrangements about bodies and funerals and so on but the victims of terrorism are special.

And who can blame the Rigg-McEwen family for feeling this way? They’ve been watching the government make political mileage out of terrorism for six years. They’ve seen the ritual ceremonies honouring the victims of September 11 and the London Underground and wondered why their daughter doesn’t rate a mention. The answer of course is that these ceremonies are not to honour the dead but to help the political fortunes of the living. Why just today a Labor front-bencher is in a shit-load of trouble for daring to state ALP policy about the death penalty in public, just because it was approaching the five year anniversary of the first Bali bombing. The ALP is against the death penalty but not sufficiently against it to actually make a case in support of its position, or so it would seem.

So who can blame the Rigg-McEwens for engaging in what otherwise might appear to be something of a tawdry gold-digging exercise? If it’s good enough for the politicians to try to get political advantage out of terrorist acts, it’s surely good enough for private individuals to try to gain some financial benefit (and yes I do feel sympathy for the family’s bereavement but that’s quite a separate issue from giving them money. Does somebody really want to argue that increasing the size of the gift will somehow ease their grief?)

Mrs Rigg-McEwen summed the issue up nicely:

“This whole thing is about every Australian being treated the same: [that if] you’ve got an Australian passport that it means something to the Australian Government.”

I couldn’t agree more. Every Australian should be treated the same. So if families are to be granted financial assistance to cover the costs associated with deaths occurring overseas, let the rules be transparent and apply equally to everyone, regardless of the cause of death. Let’s not fall mindlessly into Howard’s trap of pretending that we’re actually engaged in a real war, and that the victims of terrorist acts are some kind of war casualties deserving of privileged treatment. They’re people whose lives have ended tragically but their deaths are no more - or less - significant than those of any other Australians.