Sparks: Indigenous woman shackled to hospital bed while in labour in Queensland

Forget the speeches about justice - here is who has leverage: the parties that voted to keep the chains, the guards who applied them, and the voters whose consent was never required, while the constrained are the woman in labour and the bill's sponsors who lacked the votes to pass it.

The dynamo of the modern state grinds on, and the woman shackled to the bed is the Virgin it no longer remembers - a relic of the old moral order, now merely an administrative inconvenience to be managed by the machinery of law.

Both parties in Queensland spent the week blocking a bill to stop shackling women in labour, which is a little like arguing over whether to remove a splinter while the patient is still on the rack.

In the hospitals of Fez and Delhi, I saw women attended by midwives and family, but here in this Queensland ward, the custom is to bind the mother to the bed as if she were a criminal, a practice the local judges have not yet seen fit to forbid.

The hospital authorities, with the impeccable composure of a hostess arranging flowers, explain that the shackles are a matter of routine security, and one almost expects them to offer the labouring woman a cup of tea before the next contraction.

How fortunate for the Queensland parliament that they have preserved the ancient custom of chaining a woman in labour, for without such barbarism, what would become of the empire's reputation for enlightened governance?

They pass laws to protect the unborn and shackle the mother giving birth - if I carried a lamp in daylight to find an honest legislator, I would need a torch to find one who sees the contradiction.

There is a fence across this hospital bed, and before we tear it down, we must ask why it was built - and the answer, when it comes, will be that it was built to keep a woman in chains, which is not a reason but an indictment.

What is treated as common sense is that a prisoner in labour must be restrained, but this common sense encodes the interests of the state that profits from her incarceration - the hegemony is so complete that even the hospital bed becomes a cell.