Illustration: Edd Aragon
Slavery? Here? In Sydney?
A city, if you'll forgive the seasonal metaphor, is like an Advent calendar, only instead of chocolates or trinkets, the enchanted doors hide numberless pockets of tangled narrative.
Often these pockets are protective, guarding inestimable treasures. (Think monasteries, keeping their arcane scholarship from the barbarians.) But, like monasteries, the pockets can also hide evil.
Slavery, for example. We see slavery as other: ancient Rome, antebellum Georgia, eastern Europe. Spielberg's wonderful film Lincoln, opening here next year (and by the way, definitely worth seeing - a script to die for) deals with the President's fight to ''abolish slavery'', as though prohibition ended things. Sadly, not.
Prohibition sans enforcement just drives evil deeper. The United Nations estimates there are more slaves in the world now than ever. Human trafficking - which is not the same as slavery though the two are clearly linked, since most slaves are trafficked and most trafficking ends in slavery - rates with arms and drug-trafficking among the world's richest illicit industries.
Yet we shrug it off. Christmas and Easter might make us consider the real cost of chocolate, but it is hard to know what not to buy. (Coffee? Footballs?) Harder still to know whether buying, giving these children some money, is worse than boycotting, giving them none. The tangled nature of international law, politics and policing compounds all this, making it someone else's impossible problem.
But slavery is real, now, on our turf. So real, in fact, that two separate inquiries are under way - one state, one federal - and a new federal bill. Yet still we hear so little about it.
Slavery is no longer a chained and clanking presence on the landscape. It is unseen and unheard, its victims by definition powerless and voiceless; often women and children, foreign, uneducated, poor and frightened, hidden in the city's secret pockets - its brothels, commercial kitchens and building sites.
Rebecca Corby sees more of this than most. Corby, a federal police officer of 22 years standing, received a 2012 Freedom Award from Anti-Slavery Australia for her leadership of the Human Trafficking Team, based in Oxford Street.
She'd been in the fraud unit until, in 2001, she went to East Timor with the Vulnerable Persons Unit. "It was just more rewarding to help a person bleeding with a machete through their head," she shrugs, "than retrieving money for the Commonwealth." So, returning from maternity leave in 2004, she applied to join the Human Trafficking Team. In the eight years since, they have undertaken 350 investigations.
There are success stories, like the 15-year-old girl, kidnapped at a job interview in China, held for a year, raped repeatedly, sold and trafficked first to Malaysia, then Australia, where her false documentation was spotted by Customs. She now has her own business as a Sydney beautician.
The most famous Australian slavery prosecution - the Queen v Wei Tang 2006 - happened, naturally, in ultra-cultivated Melbourne. Wei Tang, 44, a Fitzroy brothel owner, was convicted of enslaving five Thai women whom her syndicate had brought to Australia.
For the women's sexual services, Ms Tang charged $110 per customer. Of this, she kept $43 while $67 went to the syndicate, towards each woman's notional $45,000 debt. Two of the women achieved their freedom in six months; that's 900 customers, five a day, six days a week.
On the seventh day, each woman could choose to work, and to keep $50 per customer.
Without passports, money or English and fearful of detection as illegals, the women, while not physically caged, had no real freedom. Tang appealed, arguing ignorance of the law, but the High Court found against her and she was jailed for nine years.
But the ending is seldom so rosy. Sometimes, says Corby, the servitude ''debt'', an invented portmanteau of travel, documentation and ''education'' costs, is perpetually augmented with ''fines'': not pleasing the customer, not making the bed, refusing unprotected sex or not wearing lipstick.
And even when discovered, even when convicted, many perps just get a slap on the wrist - a $1000 fine and a few weeks periodic detention.
Most Australian slavery occupies one of three categories; female sex workers, male labourers (on building sites or in restaurant kitchens) and forced marriage.
The new bill covers all these, and organ trafficking. Properly called the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Slavery, Slavery-like Conditions and People Trafficking) Bill 2012, it is expected to redefine crucial ideas like threat and coercion, make forced labour a stand-alone offence and increase penalties to genuine disincentive level, as UTS's Anti-Slavery Australia has long advocated.
But the big question is much, much bigger. For slavery is theft; an industrial-strength concentration of the life-goods of the many in the hands of the few. As such it diminishes not only its victims but also, by addiction, its beneficiaries. Us.
The UN estimates that, around the globe, 2.5 million people are in forced labour. Half are children. Almost two-thirds are in Asia-Pacific, and most are victims of physical or sexual violence. Some are in Sydney. Yet we make more fuss about live-export animals.
Clearly, Britain's empire depended on slavery, the immense engines of industry fuelled by children in the home mills, blacks in the fields of America. Without industry, argued Engels, slavery was uneconomic.
Slavery was expensive. Overheads included food, housing, medicine, even education. Modern slavery, being hidden, is perhaps more iniquitous. Now, you return their passports, turf them into the street and get a new lot.
Which makes me wonder: has civilisation ever existed without slavery? Is there any form of privileged harmony that has not stolen its fat from someone else?
To what extent does the Mac on which I write or the tea before me (imported Darjeeling, bone china) imply this unacknowledged theft?
It is not a simple question. Perhaps unanswerable. But as we shop and feast our way through Advent - inverting tradition's penitence and fasting - we might consider those trapped in the pockets of servitude, cooking the food, crafting the stocking stuffers, giving their joy for ours.
The Australian Federal Police 24-hour human trafficking hotline is 131AFP.
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