Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran could be dead within days.

For many Australians, the mere knowledge of this fact gets under the skin and stays there.

No-one has been executed in Australia since 1967, although the death penalty wasn’t officially abolished in all states until 1985, and federal legislation prohibiting capital punishment nationwide was only formalised five years ago.

Culturally though, we are unaccustomed to what we are seeing now, which is why we are collectively compelled and appalled by the grim inevitability we see every few years, when an Australian national is executed overseas.

In our society, and on our nightly news, we regularly see death come quickly and callously, through car accidents and violent crime; we sometimes see it creep up slowly through disease like cancer.

But not like this. Not at the whim of Government authorities. Not seeing young men manhandled from cells and marched to the place where they will be gunned down, with authorities proudly posing for smiling happy-snaps beside them.

The last state-sanctioned execution in Australia was that of Ronald Joseph Ryan, hanged on February 3, 1967 for shooting and killing prison officer George Hodson during an escape from Pentridge Prison.

It’s said that Ryan’s last words to his executioner were: “God bless you, please make it quick.”

Death hasn’t come quickly to Chan and Sukumaran.

It’s been a long, slow journey since their sentence in February 2006.

Nine years.

I was nine years old, living in Queensland, when Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers became the first Westerners killed under Malaysia’s drugs crackdown in 1986. I remember my father’s anger when the Courier Mail carried a front page diagram on the day of their scheduled execution, detailing how they would die.

Others tell me the media hysteria was “absolute”, remembering descriptions of the sound of neck bones breaking and the movement of the tongue.

Nearly 30 years on, the media has still somewhat failed to reconcile its duty to inform and its responsibility to soberly convey the brutal reality facing the condemned with its penchant to sensationalise – thus, a reasonable piece explaining the execution process promised in its News Corp stand-first to detail “what they will go through – up until the final bullet”.

Others assure me that community sentiment has evolved since Barlow and Chambers, and that public concern and sympathy is far more prevalent for Chan and Sukumaran. Perhaps those people haven’t scrolled through the reams of comments published beneath any given story on the pair in any given media.

A randomly-selected online News Corp story revealing one of the sentencing judges disagreed with the verdict and regretted the outcome received the following feedback (syntax unedited), amongst many others:

“This paper is really struggling to make news get over it they have been given their sentence they knew the risks and rolled the dice and lost if they were not breaking other countries laws then they would not be where they are…” (This comment garnered 18 ‘likes’).

“I also believe Australia should bring back Capital Punishment; and that murderers and paedophiles would look their best hanging from trees as decorations… how’s that ???” (11 ‘likes’)

“So over this don’t even care” (2 ‘likes’)

“Should have shot them years ago, just been used to make money from them. They knew the rules.” (1 ‘like’)

“Execution is the right decision. No point in having it as maximum if it isn’t going to be used. I don’t care what country they are from. The drugs they had would of killed more, they didn’t care about other peoples lives so why should I care about theirs” (2 ‘likes’)

Those refusing to offer sympathy for the plight of the condemned tend to fall back on two clichés: ‘do the crime, do the time’, and the assumption that the drug-smugglers didn’t have corresponding sympathy for their own ‘victims’.

I note that the types who resort to the former, who shrug that the offenders ‘knew the rules’, are the same types who regularly complain about paying some exorbitant Government levy or rail against the outcome of elections they feel misrepresented voting intent.

In other words, they happily adhere to the rules of foreign countries who kill people as punishment but question the rules of our affluent democracy.

Many Australians, perhaps, don’t want to sully their idyllic impressions of subservient Balinese waiters serving them Mango Margaritas.

Writing in News Corp, Caroline Marcus, a reporter for Channel Nine’s A Current Affair, provided a platform for the latter cliché. She asked: “What about reserving sympathy for the millions of families around the world whose lives have been torn apart by a loved one’s drug addiction?” and concluded that Chan and Sukumaran “don’t deserve our sympathy; they deserve a bullet”.

It’s certainly true that many lives are ruined by the scourge of drugs, but one cannot claim that the vast majority of users did not, at least initially, enter into that realm by dint of their own free will.

They are not ‘victims’ in the way the raped, maimed and murdered are victims. They partook in a commercial transaction for a banned substance, the harmful or addictive properties of which are widely known.

That’s less the point, though, than the simple premise that you’re either against the death penalty or you’re not. There’s no sense in abhorring it at home but shrugging your shoulders about it when it’s exercised elsewhere, dismissing its victims’ plight with a mere “They knew the rules”.

And yes, there are nine other prisoners set to be executed by the Indonesian Government in coming days, among them Brazil’s Rodrigo Gularte, who is diagnosed as bipolar, France’s Serge Areski Atlaoui, Ghana’s Martin Anderson – arrested in 2003 for possession of 50 grams of heroin – and Mary Jane Fiesta Veloso from the Philippines.

We do not hear much of them; they are not ‘our people’.

If anything, there has been louder revulsion about the Denpasar police chief’s ghoulish ‘happy-snap’ beside Chan than there has been about the legal process that led to it. There is an unhelpful undercurrent here that the Indonesians shouldn’t dare disrespect Australia in the course of executing two Australian criminals. Many Australians, perhaps, don’t want to sully their idyllic impressions of subservient Balinese waiters serving them Mango Margaritas.

But you’re either against the death penalty or you’re not.

In Australia, when a crime is perpetrated that is particularly repugnant, we often hear the cry that we should “bring back the death penalty”.

The fact is, we have made a decision as a society that it is not morally appropriate for the state to take someone’s life as retribution.

The diplomatic problem is that Indonesia has not made the same decision.

Thus, Tony Abbott’s various, increasingly desperate, appeals as the hours tick down appear to be making little headway. He has appealed to the better angels of our neighbours’ natures, he has ham-fistedly hoisted his ‘bad cop’ hat upon his head, vaguely threatening economic sanctions in a diplomatic own-goal.

But he is trying. Which is more, evidently, than many of his citizens want him to do. How sad.

The problem for Abbott is that, as Morry Bailes articulated recently, Indonesia’s drug crackdown serves a domestic agenda, against which appeasing the Australian Prime Minister is a third-order issue.

If there’s anyone who could appreciate the political reality of that, it’s Abbott. One would hardly expect him to close Australia’s immigration detention centres, or grant one nation’s asylum seekers dispensation, based on an urgent telephone call from a foreign Government.

All he can really do is stand in line behind the other leaders of countries who do not solve crime by committing what should be a further crime, and in turn put the case eloquently and respectfully.

I’ll be celebrating my daughter’s first birthday on the sixteenth of next month. We’ve already started planning the party or, at least, chiding ourselves for our failure to plan a party. In the normal scheme of things, the family of Myuran Sukumaran would be celebrating his birthday the very next day. He would be 34 this year.

Instead, they’ve already said their last goodbyes.

Tom Richardson is a senior journalist at InDaily. His column is published on Fridays.