Daughter of Bad Times

Rohan Wilson

Allen & Unwin

Otago Daily Times, July 13th 2019

One of the purposes of science fiction is to comment on contemporary situations, and outsourcing responsibility for society’s most vulnerable from the government to the free market described in Daughter of Misfortune is all too plausible.

Cabey Yasuda Corrections is a private prison operator that also manages detention centres that provide asylum seekers with the opportunity to learn good work habits, find a sense of community and productivity, and, most importantly of all, earn citizenship. On the face of it, this seems to be a win-win-win situation; the stateless are provided with a new home, the government can manage the flow of refugees, and the company has access to two lucrative revenue streams and a humanitarian branding opportunity par excellence.

The reality, of course, is that this is far from the case. With global manufacturing almost wholly automated, CYC can only turn a profit by exploiting its captive workforce to meet strict deadlines with minimal cost. At Tasmania’s Eaglehawk MTC, for example, detained refugees must spend a year assembling electronic components for a line of popular children’s toys before becoming eligible for a Visa under the Migrating With Dignity programme. As non-citizens, they are excluded from local labour laws, and their ‘wages’ are debited for bed, board, and shortfalls in work quota. Boycotts and protests of the company and its products are illegal, and when the company’s manufacturing contract is extended, Australia is only too happy to suspend the MWD indefinitely.

Rin Braden, the adoptive daughter of the company’s CEO Alessandra Michaela Braden, has been trained since childhood to step into her mother’s shoes. As executive vice president, she has spent the last few months in Tokyo attempting to persuade the government to permit Cabey Yasuda to operate in Japan but is starting to question the company’s ideology and methods. Then she discovers that the man she loves is being held at Eaglehawk MTC and attempts to rescue him, setting in train a series of events that threaten to destroy the company and her mother with it.

Despite attempts at nuance, Daughter of Bad Times is not exactly subtle. Yanaan is the ‘wronged innocent’, Rin a flawed but likeable character who has been manipulated her entire life by her mother and eventually redeems herself, and Alessandra a woman whose cruelty is an inevitable response to the pressures of turning a profit in an industry where “you make money by with-holding as many of the basics from your clients as you can, like decent food, clothing, medicine, warmth”.

The novel is also full of Orwellian double-talk that is all too familiar: Alessandra has no moral qualms about exploiting vulnerable stateless refugees with no other option since “They have incurred a debt to CYC and a debt to the Australian government for the cost of their detention. It’s not slavery to expect them to repay that debt.” Similarly, she believes that Yanaan is trying to take advantage of Rin by putting himself in a situation where she is obliged to help him.

The short excerpts from the Royal Commission into the ‘Eaglehawk riot’ that intersperse the main narrative are full of similar examples of blame-shifting, suggesting that change may be impossible to achieve. But at a time when profit all too often takes priority over humanity and wealthy countries are erecting metaphorical and literal walls to keep refugees from their shores, a direct approach may be the only way to open people’s eyes.