From the fevered precincts of the Australian Federal Police press room, where constables struggle to maintain straight faces beneath their sweat-stained caps, comes news that would make even the most jaded Cartagena cartel boss choke on his empanada. A haul of 2.4 tonnes of cocaine, seized from a fishing trawler off the coast of Queensland, has been proclaimed as the largest in the nation's history. But let us not be fooled by the bravado of briefings and the self-congratulatory backslapping. This is not a victory for law and order. This is a damning indictment of a system so riddled with hypocrisy that it would make a used car salesman blush.
Consider the arithmetic of justice. Two point four tonnes of pristine, nose-tickling Peruvian marching powder, intercepted en route to our sunburnt shores. A street value estimated at a cool one billion dollars. A billion dollars, folks. That’s enough to buy a small principality or, more pertinently, to fund a thousand political campaigns, pay off a dozen bankers, or purchase a fleet of private jets for our beloved pollies. Yet the men in blue would have us believe that this single seizure represents a fatal blow to the hydra-headed beast of organised crime. Preposterous! This is but a fleck of dandruff on the bald pate of the global narcotics trade.
The cartels, those entrepreneurs of ecstasy, those venture capitalists of vice, are not weeping into their single malts tonight. They are laughing all the way to the Cayman Islands, their accounts swelled by the billions that still flood through our porous borders every year. Our government, the same government that lectures us on the dangers of recreational substances while licensing the sale of alcohol and tobacco – two of the deadliest drugs known to humanity – now pats itself on the back for intercepting a mere 0.5% of the annual flow. It is the moral equivalent of a dieter celebrating the removal of a single peanut from his projected daily intake of ten thousand calories.
But what of the human cost? What of the young men, the desperate souls, the bottom feeders who risk life and liberty to transport these white bricks? They are the cannon fodder of a war that can never be won. They are the ghosts of globalisation, the spectres of a system that values profit above life. The trawler's crew, no doubt a motley collection of broken dreams and misadventure, will be paraded before the courts, their faces splashed across the evening news as cautionary tales. Yet the true villains, the financiers, the politicians with their hands in the till, the smugglers with their diplomatic passports, will continue to weave their webs in the comfortable shadows of Australia's boardrooms and parliament houses.
This bust is not a triumph. It is a tragic farce. A play in which the audience is expected to applaud the clown who trips over the same banana peel for the thousandth time. The Commonwealth borders, we are told, are now more secure. Perhaps. But at what cost? The war on drugs, that shrill old harpy, has been waged for half a century with no end in sight. It has filled our prisons with non-violent offenders, enriched the very cartels it purports to destroy, and turned our customs officials into para-military gatekeepers. And still, the cocaine flows. Because where there is demand, there will always be supply. And Australia, with its hedonistic appetite and its disposable income, is a market that no cartel can resist.
So raise a glass, dear readers. But not of gin, not this time. Raise a glass of fresh, cold, Australian irony. For we have just witnessed the most spectacular defeat dressed up as victory. And the only thing more absurd than the bust itself is the pretence that it changes anything at all.