Bring Schapelle Home

It’s time to bring Schapelle Corby home.

Pictures of the 31-year-old lying on the floor of Denpasar’s police hospital, dishevelled and clutching a teddy bear, have torn the nation’s heart out.

Her wide-eyed stare, paranoia and pigtails are signs of deepening depression.

Sigmund Freud called it regression: in her mind, Schapelle is once again a little girl, re-living the halcyon days before the horror of her conviction.

Veteran Bali correspondent Cindy Wokner, who visited Schapelle in Kerobokan prison last week, said she was “shocked by how she looked, how disoriented and spaced-out she was”.

According to her cellmates, she isn’t sleeping at night, forgets to take her medication, and can’t look after herself.

Dazed and confused, she wanders from room to room of the hospital, guided by her beloved mother Roseleigh Rose.

As a mother, that image is utterly heartbreaking.

I look at my daughter and wonder about her life journey; what choices she will make; what she might be forced to endure.

You see, it doesn’t matter any more whether Schapelle is innocent or guilty.

Like Lindy Chamberlain, she will vilified or deified for decades to come, reduced to dinner party debate and BBQ banter for the chattering classes.

What matters now is the life of a young girl.

Imagine if it was your sister. Or your daughter.

Make no mistake – Schapelle Corby is on the precipice.

A crime which would have garnered a short period of humane treatment in an Australian jail has left her rotting in a foreign hell-hole.

Four years ago, as Opposition Foreign Affairs spokesman, Kevin Rudd called on the Howard government to support a presidential pardon.

Since becoming Prime Minister, he is conspicuous by his silence.

In the words of one blogger “That’s Kevin Rudd… all spin and no substance. He mouths off like a puppet in a circus, yet he never delivers!”

A spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs says the government ‘would consider supporting a plea for clemency, if and when Schapelle Corby chooses to make one’.

Understandably, she has refused to make such a plea, because it requires an admission of guilt.

But her new lawyer, Iskandar Nawang, believes there’s a ‘technical’ way to appeal for clemency, while maintaining her innocence.

It’s the first real glimmer of hope in four dark years.

And it might be the only way to save Schapelle Corby’s life.

If her mental state is already this fragile, how on earth will she make it to 20 years?

At the end of the day it comes down to two things: money and politics.

Michelle Leslie paid big bucks for a fancy lawyer, and is now living in Sydney designing clothes for pets.

Thai barmat mum Annice Smoel is back in her comfortable, middle-class home, after Rudd found a ‘speedy solution’ to their mutual dilemma – four crying daughters on television is not exactly good publicity for our media-savvy PM.

So where is the speedy solution for Schapelle Corby?

Has the much-vaunted prisoner transfer deal been put on the backburner because the beauty school dropout no longer graces the front pages of our newspapers?

Will it take a suicide attempt for Mr Rudd to pull his finger out?

Politically, the signs are not good.

Indonesia holds its presidential election in July, with Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono likely to be returned to power.

He has famously said that he’s “not in the business of pardoning drug traffikers”.

Political commentators say “everything stops” when it’s an election year; no important decisions are made until after the inauguration, towards the end of 2009.

For Schapelle, it will be like Waiting for Godot – an interminable, tragic-comedy – a life-or-death game, where the only aim is to survive.

Her psychiatrist, Dr. Danny Tong, says that, while her condition is improving, she is “very depressed”.

He wants her moved to a hospice in the secluded hill town of Bangli in order to receive proper treatment.

It’s unlikely this will happen.

So, she waits, cuddling her teddy, her dead resting in her mum’s lap, trying to remember why she wants to stay alive.

As she writes so in her book, My Story, “I long to be free and live again outside these walls. I will never understand why this happened to me. I’m empty, lost and numb. I sound like a broken record but I will keep saying, I’m innocent, I’m innocent, I’m innocent.”