On 23 August, the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition invites reflection on the connection between slavery and such more modern phenomena as human trafficking, the abuse of 457 visas, women forced by penury to stay in abusive homes, and so on.
But this year the reflection was interrupted by a political story from the Northern Territory. Like most Top End stories, it was illuminating and diverting. Politicians there rely less on spin to conceal their true meaning. They tell it as they see it, and to a Southerner, what they see is often hair raising but never boring.
The Northern Territory Minister for Health, John Elferink, was interviewed by the ABC. He argued that the money spent on the health of the elderly, and particularly on those in the last year of their lives — a million dollars for each person — would be better spent on children.
I suspect if you spoke to somebody who, ... for arguments sake, had end-stage renal failure and said: 'We can continue treatment but by discontinuing treatment your grandchildren would have a better opportunity' ... Many of those old people would say 'Yeah I accept that'.
Many Australian politicians and health administrators would secretly sympathise with the position attributed to the Minister, but few would speak so bluntly. They might also be more careful with statistics and be more reluctant to upset older voters. Some might also reflect that in the Northern Territory, Indigenous Australians are seventeen times more liable to suffer from renal disease than other Australians.
Mr Elferink later clarified his comments, saying that he simply wanted to raise questions about the helpfulness of many costly interventions at the end of life, a subject already widely debated.
But underlying this debate, and latent in Mr Elferink's imagined conversation, lies the twin assumptions that the life of an older person is of less value than that of someone who is younger, and that people's value is measured by their economic contribution. On these assumptions it follows that the way in which we treat different people can rightly be decided on economic grounds.
From this perspective, people are ultimately seen as things. This is precisely the attitude of the heart that was embodied in slavery. For slavers, human beings were things to be hunted, sold, transported and sold for their labour and as breeders of future slaves. They were about profit. For traders